Billed as "the ugliest case that Carolus Deene ever chose to
investigate," Leo Bruce's Death of a Bovver Boy finds the redoubtable
schoolmaster-turned-detective involved in yet another mystery
murder--this time among teenage outcasts and skinheads in rural 1970s
England.
When Carolus's housekeeper, stoic Mrs. Stick, announces one evening that
her husband has seen the naked body of a youth lying in "a peculiar
hunched-up position" in a ditch beside the road, his hair shorn and his
wrists slashed, Carolus knows that he has, at last, met the supreme
challenge to test his powers of deduction. And this is just the
beginning: from this point on, the detective is involved in a lively
series of adventures infiltrating England's provincial underworld and
gaining insight into the dead boy's unhappy background and surroundings.
A rude collection of thugs and punks become involved in the search for
the murderer; all are equally dangerous and each might be to blame. Only
through his ingenuity and determination to persevere--despite all the
forces urging him to the contrary--does Carolus finally solve the
mystery.
This is one of Leo Bruce's grittiest novels, giving the reader an
insight into the milieu of rebellious 1970s England, a world where
prejudice was the order of the day and hostility and violence were the
only means of survival.
