There's nothing unconventional about August Derleth's "Fell Purpose" …, the first Judge Peck novel in many years. It's a pure old-fashioned whodunit of the bludgeoning of the social arbiters of a small Wisconsin town—quite, plodding, mildly agreeable, rather like an American equivalent of John Rhode, with little to suggest the originality of the author in other fields or in his noble Solar Pons detective stories.

Anthony Boucher, in a review of "Fell Purpose," in The New York Times Book Review, February 8, 1953, p. 31.