Noir crime novel from the sixties in London with a link to the Nazi realm.

Ned Balfour does not understand why would his friend would kill himself, so he starts to ask. Being warned off, he knows that there is a why.

The book reads more like a social novel with a mystery undertones than a mystery novel.
While I appreciate the intelligent writing and the dry humour - and the cause is worthy - the entertainment factor and the readability is lacking for me. The novel is short, but the actual story comes off as a bit slow.

Still, this is an interesting foray into the rich historical annals of the British mysteries!

Slightly better read than my last outing with Sims - The End of the Web. There is a little more of a mystery to solve - why his friend committed suicide and why is he being warned off - could the two be related (of course they are). Ned Balfour is your typical noir character and perfectly at home on the pages of Sims' novel. Readers should allow for the obviously different social mores as this was written over 50 years ago.

Princess Fuzzypants here: Sometimes I am overwhelmed with books and do not get to book at the time they are released. I try to go back but it would have been impossible for me to go back the 50 plus years since it first came out. It was rereleased last year and it is a good one, well worth the effort to find.
When we first meet Ned Balfour, he lives a shallow sybaritic life, flowing from one pleasure to another, never really growing up, never taking on the mantle of responsibility for anything but his own pleasures. His world is about to change when he receives the cable that his best friend is dead and the circumstances are troubling. He had received an earlier cable from Sammy, the friend, saying they needed to speak the next day about a serious matter. What could have happened? Sammy, a sufferer of vertigo, fell to his death from a tall building. Nothing makes sense to Ned.
He reaches out to mutual friends and colleagues until he is attacked and told to back off by some vicious thugs. He is convinced he should leave the investigation to the police....until he shows up at an auction in the suburbs of London that is very strange indeed. Instead of walking away from the mystery, Ned finds himself right in the middle of a conspiracy to cover up the crime.
This is a taut and tight book with elegant language. I found myself looking up the definition of some words that I had never come across before. It does not detract from the story. The twisted tale takes Ned from Concentration camps to Germany at the end of WW II to London of 1966. Every step builds up the suspense and the final outcome is a real nail biter.
If you enjoy a sophisticated mystery, this book is for you. I give it five purrs and two paws up

In some ways, The Last Best Friend hasn’t aged very well. Ned Balfour’s a womanizing dealer in manuscripts, separated from his wife and prey to the easy sex of 1960s London. When the novel was first published in 1967, groping was obviously more acceptable with fictional sleuths (think James Bond, Charles Mordecai, Sam Spade) than in the era of Harvey Weinstein. The novel’s beginning is a middle-aged man’s fantasy come to life: The novel opens with Ned on vacation in Capri with a pretty, receptive blonde young enough to be his daughter — visions of Roy Moore.

However, Sims eventually gets past the sleazy sex and spins a yarn so suspenseful that I couldn’t put it down. (Forgive the cliché, but it’s true!) Balfour’s best friend, Sammy Weiss, a Jewish Holocaust survivor beset with a terror of heights, steps out on a high ledge and then plunges to his death. Balfour is puzzled why Weiss would pick such an unlikely route to suicide, or even why Weiss would kill himself at all. Balfour proves as relentless in seeking out the truth as he is in seeking out manuscripts. Despite the niggling rape culture disquiet, I still have to highly recommend this page-turner.

In the interest of full disclosure, I received this book from NetGalley, British Library and Poisoned Pen Press in exchange for an honest review.

George Sims, (1923-1999) has been referred to contemporaneously and posthumously as a prodigiously talented writer of noir, memoirs and gritty realistic mystery/thrillers. He was also an antiquarian bookseller in real life and wrote about his acquaintances and acquisitions in the rare book trade. His writing garnered praise from a host of fellow writers and this particular book, The Last Best Friend , was included in H.R.F. Keating's list of '100 best crime and mystery books'.

The Last Best Friend (title taken from a poem by Robert Southey) begins abruptly with the falling death/suicide of Sammy Weiss, best friend of the main character, Ned Balfour. Ned, who is an antiquarian/rare book seller, is out of the country at the time, but immediately travels back to London to investigate. Sammy was extremely acrophobic and Ned can't get his head around the idea of him intentionally committing suicide in such a way.

I was immediately struck by the quality of the writing. Technically flawless and gripping, the author manages to write two simultaneous scenes at the same time without detracting from either one, and also without being confusing in the slightest degree for the reader. The writing is very simple and pared-down. Sims was a master of 'show, don't tell'.

I devoured this book in one sitting and immediately reread it (and noticed a lot of things which I had missed on the first read-through). Wonderfully written with a solid plot and dialogue that is pitch perfect. A lot of reviews mention 'swinging 60's London', but apart from mentioning place names, the setting and time period weren't really central to the plot line. It didn't read as terribly dated as one might expect from other novels of the time period (compared to, for example, John Creasey (who is one of my secret passions - love his books, too)). I really admire that Sims never puffs up or shows off his writing. The descriptions are well rendered but not overly so, the characters are believable and the dialogue is spot on. There are, admittedly, some quotes which are dated ("He looked like a homosexual of the rare, vicious kind") and jarring (along with some *cough* relatively innocent(?) misogyny), but in general, the book reads well to a modern audience.

This is an author who deserves a much wider readership. For fans of Ross Macdonald, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain and company, Sims, though certainly less famous (and British), will fill the bill nicely.

Originally released in 1967, and republished in all formats Nov 7th, 2017 by Poisoned Pen, with a new introduction for this edition by Martin Edwards.

Five enthusiastic stars

This book was written in the sixties and it was still very relevant today. It is about a man who is an unfaithful husband who receives information that his best friend commited suicide. As he delves further into the details of what happened he begins to suspect that his friend was murdered and some thugs trying to stop his personel investigation further convinces him he is right. This all takes place in London and the descriptions of what it was like there in the sixties is spot on. I would definitely recommend this to anyone who likes a good mystery.

The Last Best Friend opens with recently separated Ned Balfour enjoying a lighthearted Mediterranean vacation with a young woman. He receives a cable from his best friend Sammy Weiss telling him he has a “terrible decision” to make and needs Ned’s advice. Before Ned can call him, he gets another telegram telling him his friend is dead and he must come home.

He can’t quite understand why his friend would kill himself, particularly since jumping out a window is probably that last choice of an acrophobe with vertigo. He asks around among their mutual friends to see if he can understand what the terrible decision might be and if there is some explanation.

He is soon warned off by a menacing enforcer accompanied by a few hired strongmen. I really don’t understand why bad guys “warn off” folks like Balfour who without their intervention might soon have decided there was really nothing to investigate. Once you are warned off, you know there is something to investigate. It’s a big flashing neon sign that there is some crime.



George Sims wrote The Last Best Friend in the Sixties and that is when it takes place. Seeing the date 1966 in the story, though, always left me disconcerted because it felt so much more like a post-World War II novel. It felt out of its time. Did England in the late Sixties still orient itself fully around World War II or what that a generational orientation? I just felt the time and the mood of the novel were incongruent.

I like the way Sims writes. I was interested in Ned Balfour and his friend’s death. I wanted to know the answers. I figured it out, but I think that’s because this plot has been used several more times since it was published in 1967. It would have been so much fresher then. It is unfortunate his work has gone out of fashion because he was a clever writer.

I received an e-galley of The Last Best Friend from the publisher through NetGalley.

The Last Best Friend at Poisoned Pen Press
George Sims at GoodReads

3.5 star.

Overall an enjoyable, quick suspenseful read. Poisoned Pen Pressed advertises "The Last Best Friend" as a thriller but this isn't much a thriller to me. Suspenseful enough, the plot certainly is somewhat captivating and memorable, slightly more than satisfactory but nothing spectacular.

What I love about the book is the simple but intriguing plot. Is the death of the protagonist's best friend incidental, intentional or suicidal? What happened? Who's involved? "The Last Best Friend" has all the successful elements to build a strong suspense novel yet George Sims' attention to extremely trivial details, at times, is distracting. In most cases, though, the extremely descriptive details do secure a strong noir atmosphere which makes "The Last Best Friend" an unique reading experience.

Thanks Poisoned Pen Press for introducing this long forgotten gem.

Few people would do what Ned Balfour does in George Sims’ The Last Best Friend. After Balfour’s friend, Sam Weiss, falls out a window and dies, Ned drops his sunny holiday in Corsica and heads back to London to find out why. It doesn’t make sense that Weiss would commit suicide. Plus, there is the telegram he sent Balfour about a “terrible decision” he had to make. The best clue that Weiss didn’t kill himself comes later in the book, when Balfour is beaten up. Every mystery reader knows that that the detective is definitely asking the right questions when someone beats them up.

Balfour, at first, is the kind of man I don’t like much. He’s a cheater and still has a lot of maturing to do even though he’s well into middle age. But the more time I spent with Balfour, the more I started to admire his loyalty to his friend, Weiss. The police are treating Weiss’ death as an accident or, more probably to their way of thinking, as a suicide. The inspector in charge of the case asks Balfour a few interesting questions, but doesn’t seem to be pursuing the few leads the police have. Balfour takes those leads and runs—well, moseys in a good suit while also taking in the occasional auction and drinking good wine.

To be honest, I didn’t think there was much to the case until a few more clues surfaced linking Weiss and a few other members of their antiques, manuscript, and art dealing circle with art looted at the end of World War II. Balfour is an unlikely detective but he seems to have a knack for asking the right questions. He’s also got the right kind of stubbornness to keep going in spite of all the close calls with various thugs and villains.

The Last Best Friend was originally published in the 1960s and is now being rereleased by Poisoned Pen Press. Between Poisoned Pen and the British Library, there’s been a little renaissance of mid-century mysteries that I’ve been very much enjoying. The only problem is that these rereleases have made me start to wonder how many books are languishing, waiting to be read again. So many books, so little time.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley for review consideration. It will be released 7 November 2017.

"Last Best Friend" is a mystery set mostly in England in 1966 and was originally published in 1967. The mystery involved something that happened during WWII. However, the first 27% of the story was mostly a mid-aged man (Ned Balfour) carrying on an affair with a girl half his age and, later on, having sex with a friend of his wife. The actual sex happened "off screen" and was thought or talked about using euphemistic terms, but there was one scene with graphically described upper body female nudity.

Anyway, it took a while for Ned to decide that his best friend's death was suspicious and that he should look into what his friend was doing that last week. He wasn't particularly clever in how he tracked down clues. Sam's other friends passed on most of the needed information, and some thugs let him know that he was on the right track. Once all of the information came together, Ned tried to deal with it himself before finally deciding to tell the police what he knew. Vengeance is his. There was some bad language. Overall, I'd recommend this interesting mystery (though it took a while to get going).

The introduction by Martin Edwards illuminates further who George Sims was (d. 1999) and perhaps why he isn’t as well known as his contemporaries of the time (the “Swinging Sixties”) like John le Carre and Len Deighton.
Sims’ style is descriptive, literary, revealing a deep knowledge of London. Ned Balfour can’t reconcile that his friend Sam, a concentration camp survivor, has committed suicide. Both Balfour and Sam are antiquarian booksellers (as Sims was until his death), and Ned is driven to find the answer to his friend’s state of mind.  The antique books world is wonderfully depicted as this is Sim’s home turf.
I loved Ned Balfour for his self-analysis, his somewhat jaded view of the world. His descriptions and relationships with women are archaic, but not as problematic as the homophobia that Simms’s prose touches on. It’s the 1960s, however, and I’ve read worse from modern authors. The writing and the plot were too good, and I don’t want to give you the wrong idea.
For an antiquarian bookseller, he’s pretty tough, but both he and Sam are the WWII generation. Ned easily talks women into bed, and he finds himself, as he approaches middle age, kind of creepy. The plot twists and turns as Ned gradually figures out Sam was murdered and drives himself hard to find out who and why. Charming and engaging, I’ll be reading more of George Sims.

The Last Best Friend (BL, first published 1967)
The End of the Web (BL, first published 1976)

The British Library’s initiative to bring twentieth-century crime fiction back into print (in association with Poisoned Pen press in the U.S.) has kick-started a large movement. In the UK, Martin Edwards introduces many of the books in the British Library Thrillers series. These two, he argues, are unusual in their dark plotting and darker characters. Well, yes, and The End of the Web is full of false starts, false trails, and unsolved deaths right to the last page. ‘Web’ here means a web of extreme-right figures brought together by a pro-Hitler aristocrat, and The Last Friend involves more Nazi sympathisers trying to cover up their looting at the end of the war. The books are characterized by central characters who just happen to get involved, rather in the vein of Eric Ambler, but littered with loose ends. Much of the early parts of The Last Best Friend are not much like crime fiction, because they concentrate on a Lothario, Balfour, who has left his wife for adventure, and only pulls himself together when he receives a telegram from a good friend begging for his advice about a terrible decision he must make. Balfour’s engagement with the friend and his decision changes his life. In fact, it changes more than one life.
The great strength of Sims’s writing is his ability to catch a character, and to write of that character so convincingly that the reader is quite likely to forget that there doesn’t seem to be a reason for him (it’s usually a him) to be there. Sims made a living as a bookseller, and was what one might call a Sunday author; his colleagues claimed to recognize versions of themselves in his books.

A quick but interest-sustaining read, George Sims wrote this book in the 1960s, about a swinging and hip World War II veteran on the hunt for whoever murdered his concentration camp survivor friend. Ned Balfour, who is separated from his wife, alienated from his children, and has an infidelity problem, receives a telegram while playing with a bikini-clad nymph in the Mediterranean. His dearest friend, Sammy Weiss, needs his "advice on a terrible decision" that he must make. He requests Ned call him the next morning. Unfortunately Sammy doesnt live long enough to receive a call.

Returning to London, Ned must unravel the details of Sammy's last days leading to his death and make his own decisions regarding his family.

Not deep, and probably not suspenseful by today's standards, but I enjoyed this little diversion from my normal gut-wrenching, sob-provoking (I love using hyphenated words!) novels. I also enjoyed descriptions of the retro 1960s decor and the recurring theme of identity. Hint: If you read this one, note the number of times nameplates on doors is mentioned.

Why does Sam Weiss fall ten stories to his death, when he suffers from vertigo? Was he killed? Ned investigates until he finds the answers lying back in time to art stolen during WWII. A fast-paced suspenseful book with twists that will leave you breathless. Thank you to The Poisoned Pen Press for reprinting George Sims' books. I can't wait to read the next heart-pounding tale by this author.

Perhaps if I were British, I might find this book fascinating. They do approach things a bit differently on that side of the Pond. But, alas, as an American reader, I need a bit more action, a bit more plotting, a bit more of a lot of things. Bottom line is I tried and tried, but this book just didn't fit me. Maybe it would fit someone else a bit better?