"Mystery writer and critic H. R. F. Keating wrote, in an introduction to a 1987 reissue of the first Witherall novel, "If a writer can keep in play an interest in a crime of some sort, preferably indeed murder, and at the same time induce the reader to take the hither-and-thither balloon flight of farce, then the entertainment provided will be not doubled but tripled.But it is difficult.