Such Queer Goings-On: Death on Allhallowe'en (1970), by Leo Bruce

The 1970s saw the last decade of life of Rupert Croft-Cooke, aka mystery writer Leo Bruce. 66 years old when the decade began, he made it to June 10, 1979, just ten days shy of his seventy-sixth birthday and five weeks after Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister of England, having suffered a significantly debilitating stroke in 1974. Before that stroke, between 1970 and 1974, he published four additional Leo Brice detective novels, the final quartet of the Carolus Deene series: Death on Allhallowe'en (1970), Death by the Lake (1971), Death in the Middle Watch and Death of a Bovver Boy (both 1974). Death on Allhallowe'en is probably the best of the four.Though long dead, notorious British occultist Aleister Crowley plays a role in Leo Bruce's Death on Allhallowe'en.Death on Allhallowe'en--I'm going to write DOA from here on out because I'm already tired of writing "Allhallowe'en"--is the last of the Carolus Deene tales where the gentlemanly amateur detective is employed as a…