“Full of adventure but not the author’s best in plot or characterization.”
+ − Booklist 17:161 Ja ’21
“With ‘The sirdar’s sabre’ something seems to have gone radically wrong. From the man who built up such atmosphere and vitality as was in ‘The wings of the morning’ this book is inexcusable. Here we find no sustained interest, little of characterization, and slight exercise of the descriptive powers which the author possesses. Mr Tracy is to be soundly berated for wasting excellent material.” J. W. D. S.
− Boston Transcript p4 O 9 ’20 580w + − N Y Times p19 O 24 ’20 300w
Reviewed by Caroline Singer
Pub W 98:661 S 18 ’20 300w
TRACY, LOUIS. Strange case of Mortimer Fenley. $1.90 Clode, E. J.
20–2642
“When John Trenholme, artist, accepted a welcome commission from a magazine editor to journey down to a certain old Hertfordshire village and make a series of sketches of its imperiled beauties, he looked forward to nothing more exciting than an agreeable, wholly peaceful little expedition. Certainly he did not in the least expect to get mixed up with a murder. It was a series of accidents which caused him to be at a spot from which he could see a certain portion of the beautiful old Elizabethan mansion misnamed ‘The towers’ at the moment when Mortimer Fenley, banker, fell, ‘shot dead on his own doorstep.’ Mr Fenley’s elder son, Hilton, telephoned to Scotland Yard, and that was how the two detectives, known to their colleagues as the ‘Big ‘un’ and the ‘Little ‘un’ came to the assistance of the local police, one of whom had already, and quite without suspecting the fact, had an extremely important share in the development of events which was to bring about the solution of a most involved and puzzling mystery.”—N Y Times