During her writing career, Joan Fleming wrote some thirty-three mystery novels, some historical, all quite varied in approach, with finely delineated characters, surprising twists of plot, and amusing or compelling eccentricities. Her principle series character, Nuri Bey Iskirlak, a Turkish philosopher, represents part of the growing British interest in ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s, reflected, for example, in the works of Gavin Black, Arthur Upfield, H. R. F. Keating, and James McClure. In keeping with this interest, she set several of her novels in exotic locales, for example, Paris in The Good and the Bad (1953), a Portuguese fishing village in Death of a Sardine (1963), and Helsinki in You Won't Let Me Finish (1973; published in the United States as You Won't Let Me Finnish, 1974). Most of her novels are psychological studies of a community's response to murder rather than reports of investigative methods. Kathleen Klein in Twentieth Century...