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Superintendent Ditteridge #5
Blood Flies Upwards
Ex library, usual stamps and marks, page edges tanned and marked, worn dust jacket is in a protective sleeve.
- GenresMystery
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1976
About the author
Elizabeth Ferrars
92 books28 followersAka E.X. Ferrars.
Born Morna Doris McTaggart in Rangoon, Burma of a Scottish father and an Irish-German mother, she grew up in England where she moved at age six. She attended Bedales school and then took a diploma in journalism at London University.
Her first two novels, 'Turn Single' (1932) and 'Broken Music' (1934), came out under her own name, Morna McTaggart. In the early 1930s she married her first husband but she left him, moved to Belsize Park in London and lived with Dr Robert Brown, a lecturer in botany at Bedford College in 1942. She eventually divorced her first husband in October 1945 and married Dr, later Professor, Brown.
It was in 1940 that her first crime novel 'Give a Corpse a Bad Name' was published under the pseudonymn that she had adopted, Elizabeth (sometimes Elizabeth X. - particularly in the USA) Ferrars, the Ferrars her mother's maiden name. This novel featured her young detective Toby Dyke, who was to feature in four other of her novels.
When her husband was offered a post at Cornell University in the USA, the couple moved there but remained only a year before returning to Britain. They travelled with her husband's work, on one occasion visiting Adelaide when he was a visiting professor at the University of South Australia, and later moved to Edinburgh where her husband was appointed Regius Professor of Botany and they lived in the city until 1977 when, on her husband's retirement, they moved to Blewsbury in Oxfordshire where they lived until her sudden death in 1995.
She continued to write a crime novel almost every year and in 1953 she was a founding member of the Crime Writers' Association of which she later became chairperson in 1977.
As well as her short series of works featuring Toby Dyke, she wrote a series featuring retired botanist Andrew Basnett and another series featuring a semi-estranged married couple, Virginia and Felix Freer. All in all she wrote over seventy novels, her final one 'A Thief in the Night' being published posthumously.
Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor described her as having "a sound enough grasp of motives and human relations and a due regard for probability and technique, but whose people and plot are so standard".
Gerry Wolstenholme
November 2010
Born Morna Doris McTaggart in Rangoon, Burma of a Scottish father and an Irish-German mother, she grew up in England where she moved at age six. She attended Bedales school and then took a diploma in journalism at London University.
Her first two novels, 'Turn Single' (1932) and 'Broken Music' (1934), came out under her own name, Morna McTaggart. In the early 1930s she married her first husband but she left him, moved to Belsize Park in London and lived with Dr Robert Brown, a lecturer in botany at Bedford College in 1942. She eventually divorced her first husband in October 1945 and married Dr, later Professor, Brown.
It was in 1940 that her first crime novel 'Give a Corpse a Bad Name' was published under the pseudonymn that she had adopted, Elizabeth (sometimes Elizabeth X. - particularly in the USA) Ferrars, the Ferrars her mother's maiden name. This novel featured her young detective Toby Dyke, who was to feature in four other of her novels.
When her husband was offered a post at Cornell University in the USA, the couple moved there but remained only a year before returning to Britain. They travelled with her husband's work, on one occasion visiting Adelaide when he was a visiting professor at the University of South Australia, and later moved to Edinburgh where her husband was appointed Regius Professor of Botany and they lived in the city until 1977 when, on her husband's retirement, they moved to Blewsbury in Oxfordshire where they lived until her sudden death in 1995.
She continued to write a crime novel almost every year and in 1953 she was a founding member of the Crime Writers' Association of which she later became chairperson in 1977.
As well as her short series of works featuring Toby Dyke, she wrote a series featuring retired botanist Andrew Basnett and another series featuring a semi-estranged married couple, Virginia and Felix Freer. All in all she wrote over seventy novels, her final one 'A Thief in the Night' being published posthumously.
Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor described her as having "a sound enough grasp of motives and human relations and a due regard for probability and technique, but whose people and plot are so standard".
Gerry Wolstenholme
November 2010
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 4, 2021
Not sure why this book is listed as being by EX Ferrars - Elizabeth Ferrars is the name on the cover of the one I've just read! This reminded my of the kind of fairly low-key, domestic crime fiction of Margaret Yorke. And I could imagine this type of story being dramatised in one of those 1980s Armchair Thriller series in the 1980s!
An easy read, straightforward plot, although quite atmospheric.
Will look out for other Ferrars books, although they seem pretty hard to find these days.
© Koplowitz 2021
An easy read, straightforward plot, although quite atmospheric.
Will look out for other Ferrars books, although they seem pretty hard to find these days.
© Koplowitz 2021
May 25, 2026
There's a mild lunacy that runs through this one that I quite enjoyed. I could also envision it re-envisioned as an A24 nutso-thriller. In addition to the core Ferrars ingredients (intersecting affairs, blackmail), we've got a nifty little setup in which a woman applies for a summer house housekeeping position in order to get to the bottom of why her sister disappeared when she took the same job. No one, of course, is who they seem to be, including the admirably weird elderly sisters who live next door. A nice little nutrition-free beach read from 1977.
February 24, 2013
Alison is a truthful woman--but she'd tell any lie to get the job as cook/housekeeper at a remote country house. Her sister Sally had that job, and then disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to Sally, but Alison is determined to find out. A murder complicates her search.
January 19, 2013
Somewhat slight, but good story. Alison takes a post as cook in the household where her sister worked before she disappeared. Everyone is hiding secrets. 3.5 stars, really
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews