When you have a detective novel that starts off with the characters arguing about the believability of detective stories, you know you're in for a self-conscious take on the genre. Many of these sorts of parodies and satires fall flat because they either fail to include an interesting mystery or they've obviously been written by someone who doesn't really know or even like the genre.

Leo Bruce's "Case for Three Detectives" doesn't fail, and for two reasons: 1) Its pastiche of three famous detectives -- Lord Simon Plimsoll (aka Lord Peter Wimsey), Monsieur Amer Picon (aka Hercule Poirot) and Monsignor Smith (aka Father Brown) -- is very funny and very clever, and 2) the author obviously loves the genre and respects its conventions even as he pokes fun at them.

There's a fourth detective involved in this case -- the local police official, Sgt. Beef. Beef represents the seemingly slow-witted officer who always jumps to conclusions in Golden Age whodunnits and is always shown up at the end by the brilliant amateur sleuth. In "Case for Three Detectives," however, the beer-drinking, darts-playing, unpretentious Beef gets some revenge for his literary type, as he gets to show up the three geniuses through use of plain ol' common sense.

With four detectives in this book, you get four different solutions to the crime, all based on the same facts. Each solution is ingenious, in its own way -- although only one can be correct, of course.

There are a lot of inside jokes waiting for readers of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and G.K. Chesterson, and for these readers I give this book four stars. You folks will really get a kick out of this novel on more than one level. Bruce does a wonderful job capturing the voices, attitudes and styles of all three famous detectives.

For those of you who don't like the old-style "puzzle" mysteries, though, and prefer the more modern style of psychological intrigue and suspense, you might not enjoy this book quite as much. I will say, however, that it reads like a shot (you can easily finish it in one sitting) and so the time investment isn't too great, even if you're not too familiar with the mystery style of the 1920s and '30s.

For those of you who miss the Golden Age writers, this book will be a real treat.

(One complaint -- the copyediting of this edition is, well, pretty bad. There are a lot of typos. If you're really bugged by this sort of thing, this edition might distract you a bit. I don't think they're the type of errors that actually slow you up while reading, so they didn't bother me much and thus didn't affect my four-star rating. Your call, though.)