Because I Needed a Homes Fix …

The Case of the Mexican Knife, by “Geoffrey Homes,” aka Daniel Mainwaring (Bantam, 1948). Originally titled The Street of the Crying Woman (1942), this novel stars a particularly dapper Mexican detective named José Manuel Madero. Although blogger Brittany Hague strangely misidentifies Homes as being, in actuality, Cornell Woolrich, her 2008 post in BrixPicks offers the only substantive information I’ve been able to track down online about the plot of The Case of the Mexican Knife. Hague writes that it’s about “Mitchell Drake, a teacher living in the U.S., who goes back to his home country of Mexico to find his missing brother. Once there he finds one body after another and many shady and unknown enemies with plans to kill him. He’s being followed and following, he’s being beaten and shot at but the whole time all he can think of is the student he’s in love with, who is also in Mexico, but is herself in love with a no-good double-crossing revolutionary.” Kirkus Reviews adds that the novel features “hidden treasure, a revolutionary underground movement, impersonation and revenge.” Under his Homes pseudonym, author Mainwaring also wrote the 1946 private-eye novel Build My Gallows High. Cover illustration by Bob Doares.