Tuesday Night Bloggers: Multiple Mask Murders

It so happens that I have fairly recently read two detective novels which revolved round multiple masks. To be quire precise, one, Josephine Bell's Death in Clairvoyance was about six people dressed as clowns in green and white costumes and masks at a fancy dress ball and the other one, Mavis Doriel Hay's The Santa Klaus Murder, was about two (as it turns out) people dressed as the not so jolly fat man in red costume and lots of facial hair.

Josephine Bell is one of the underrated writers of both classic detective stories and thrillers. A physician as well as a prolific author, she co-founded the Crime Writers' Association in 1953 and was later its Chair. A number of her books take place in and around hospitals and one of her series heroes is a medical student, later ever more eminent doctor, David Wintringham, who is the semi-amateur detective in Death in Clairvoyance as well.

It is 1949, the war is slowly receding into memory though there are still mined areas along the coast and, naturally, rationing, and the Wintringham family, David, his wife Jill and their four precocious children are on holiday by the sea when they become involved in the murder of one clown by, it seems, another clown. Seems is the right word since the murder is either sighted ahead or seen as it is happening in another part of the hotel by a clairvoyant. The victim turns out to be the clairvoyant's husband who had introduced distinctly cheating methods into her seances and caused her imprisonment. In the meantime, there are several chapters of people trying to sort out all the different clowns, who they were, when did they collect their costumes and putting the general mayhem into order.

The Wintringham children go off to investigate on their own and very nearly end up dead - the description of them being caught in a cave after an explosion and having to escape is taut and terrifying. There is another murder, an attempted murder, a seance and the criminal is unmasked.

Fascinatingly, the whole question of clairvoyance is treated with seriousness, leaving the reader to decide whether it is real. David and others spend some time thinking about the subject and wondering whether they believe it but it is clear that Odette Hamilton is not a fraud and does, indeed, see certain things. In fact, she is of some help to the investigators. This is rather different from the usual description of seances, for instance in Sayers's Strong Poison or A. E. W. Mason's At the Villa Rosa, both assuming that such practices are fraudulent though the intentions can be good.

Mavis Doriel Hay wrote only three detective novels in the thirties and these were forgotten until the British Library decided to reprint them. The Santa Klaus Murder is the last one she wrote (in 1936) and is, in my opinion, the best. They are all very well written (Mavis Doriel Hay was also an early graduate of Oxford, attending St Hilda's College about the same time as Sayers was at Somerville) but the other two have an ai of facetiousness that is absent in this novel, though the descriptions are still amusing.

The plot revolves round a possible new will to be made by a very rich man, a Christmas party with lots of incongruous guests as well as obnoxious children and two Santa Klaus costumes. There is a map, which is quite useful though the various comings and goings in the crucial half an hour are almost impossible to follow, a locked room as well as an impossible murder and a story written quite deliberately from several points of view. All very clever and enjoyable.

Though Santa Klaus does not wear a mask, it is a fair point that the hood, the whiskers, the eyebrows (very important) and the heavy dab of rouge makes it very hard to identify the wearer of the costume. Very hard but not impossible, I am glad to say, though I share the view of many children that there is something sinister about that fat man in red.

Tuesday Night Bloggers: Death Wears a Mask

A new month and a new theme. We are coming up to Hallowe'en (which I tend to ignore as my house is protected by my black cat who sits on the window sill and glares at all potential trick-or-treaters) so it was decided to deal with murder in costume. As before Kate Jackson is collecting all the contributions on her blog. They are very well worth reading.

Several people wrote about Agatha Christie in the first week. It is, in fact, almost impossible to produce a clutch of blogs about classic detective stories (let us not get into an argument as to what is and what is not Golden Age) without mentioning that lady and her output. Despite the fact that it is fashionable to dismiss her work (a trend that, I am sorry to say, the Baroness James strongly contributed to) the truth is that it was often of the first order on many more levels than just clever plots, Several aspects of crime and detective fiction were pioneered by her.

My colleagues among the Tuesday Night Bloggers  covered a number of Christie's novels and short stories in which people wear masks in the sense of masquerading as someone else. Off the top of my head I can refer to A Murder Is Announced (in which only about two members of a household are what they say they are), After The Funeral (in which we see the same person in two guises without realizing it) and One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (about which I cannot say anything without giving away the plot). There are others but I want to look at a slight adventure, one of the Beresfords' about whom I have written before here and here.

One of their adventures in Partners in Crime, which spreads over two stories, Finessing the King and The Gentleman Dressed in Newspaper, deals with murder committed by a masked man with the victim also being masked. The crime is committed in a private room of a rather shady cafe, called The Ace of Spades, to which the Beresfords go at midnight, having attended (in Tommy's case reluctantly) The Three Arts Ball. They hear a cry and sinister laughter in the room next to theirs and go in to find a dying lady dressed as the Queen of Hearts, who manages to whisper that Bingo did it. Nothing is exactly straightforward and Tuppence manages to work out the truth because she remembers something Tommy had told her about differences in newsprint from day to day in what must be their favourite newspaper, The Daily Leader. That and the killer's sinister laughter.

Masquerading as another person or wearing a mask to hide the real personality is a frequent Christie device. In this story, the mask is physical - the killer assumes another's outfit in order to confuse both victim and police.

Like most of the stories in Partners in Crime this is clever but skight. As so often with Christie's work, it gives a delightful picture of life in London of a particular period, in this case, the mid-twenties - the fancy dress balls and the caffs one can go to for bacon and eggs or Welsh rabbit [that is the original spelling, by the way] afterwards; the ladies and gentlemen who manage to live on private income, which causes criminal problems and the ease with which one can acquire just the right fancy dress costume.

This is a McCarty Incog. story with Tuppence managing to get the right clothes for them to wear at the ball, pointing out that it is time they studied and imitated some American detective methods. (Their original plan or, rather, Tuppence's original plan is to work out what a particular personal ad means as a kind of practice as business is none too brisk. Actually, business for Blunt's Brilliant Detectives is never too brisk, which is surprising in the light of their success.) Tuppence is McCarty the former cop who usually solves the problem because of some simple comment by his friend Dennis Riordan, the fireman. That is what happens here.

The 1983 - 1984 TV series with Francesca Annis, James Warwick and Reece Dinsdale, a more successful version than the 2015 one abandoned several aspects of the original. There was no question of Soviet espionage, which made some of the introductory comments by Inspector Marriott (Mr Carter, the Chief, was dropped completely) somewhat incomprehensible and it was clearly decided that the audiences will not manage to understand the references to classic detective stories. No mention of McCarty and Riordan and Tuppence's costume is a rather poor version of somebody's idea of Sherlock Holmes while Tommy swelters away as Dr Watson. To be fair, none of the other detectives are mentioned either, which makes the Beresfords' lunch at the ABC Corner House (The Sunningdale Mystery) also incomprehensible. One can hear a subtext but there is no explanation.

I can't help feeling that is rather a pity. In the first place, one or two of the references would be comprehensible and, secondly, even if they are not, the idea of imitating great fictional detectives is a highly amusing one. You never know, some viewers might try to find out more.

Tuesday Night Bloggers: Children as detectives

This is the last posting in this series of blogs about Children in Crime and as ever Kate Jackson is collecting links on her blog crossexaminingcrime. There have been some cracking submissions.

As for me, I decided to have a look at children as detectives. I thought about Roy Fuller's With My Little Eye but decided against it precisely because of what is in that brief analysis: it may be narrated by a teenager who is the detective but it is really a book for adults. Nothing wrong with that but it wasn't quite what I was looking for.

So I had a look at some of the Famous Five books, which are really adventure stories or thrillers for children. They are not as bad as some people make them out but they are not very good either. Incidentally I was delighted to see that the rather precious attempt to "update" the language of those books flopped miserably and the publishers have gone back (more or less) to the originals, which are once again being reprinted. It just goes to show that children are not as stupid as some adults think, something I never doubted.

Nothing for it, I decided, but to go back to the best of those children's detective stories, written for children and enjoyed by them for generations (even when they have grown up) and in many languages. I am talking about Erich Kästner's great book: Emil and the Detectives. Written and published in 1928 it is not, strictly speaking, a detective story but a thriller about a group of children stalking, pursuing and capturing a villain who had stolen Emil's money and who turns out to be a bank robber as well.


The book was illustrated by Walter Trier and those drawings have never been bettered. It remained in print since then not just in Germany but in many other countries and read by generations of children. The Nazis listed Erich Kästner as a decadent and burned all his books except for Emil as it was too popular. One would like to think that the Nazi thugs were terrified of the howls of outrage from their own children.

On a more tragic note, it was also the book that was most frequently found among the last treasured possessions of children who had been transported to the camps and sent off into those showers. When Kästner was told about that after the war, he burst into tears. Not much more one can do.

Erich Kästner was born in Dresden in 1899, spent some time in the army in First World War and after finishing his education moved first to Leipzig where he became a journalist until he was sacked for being too frivolous and occasionally near-pornographic. He moved to Berlin in 1927 but continued to contribute to Leipzig publications under various pseudonyms.

Kästner's years in Berlin, from 1927 until the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933, were his most productive. He published poems, newspaper columns, articles, and reviews in many of Berlin's important periodicals. He was  regular contributor to dailies such as the Berliner Tageblatt and the Vossische Zeitung, as well as to Die Weltbühne. Hans Sarkowicz and Franz Josef Görtz, the editors of his complete works (1998), list over 350 articles written between 1923 and 1933, but he must have written even more, since many texts are known to have been lost when Kästner's flat was burned down during a bombing raid in February 1944.

He was also a poet. Indeed, his first published work was poetry and he never stopped writing that (as what poet does?), producing a particularly moving poem on his return to the destroyed city of his childhood, Dresden, in 1945.

So, in 1928 he wrote Emil and the Detectives, the story of a boy of probably twelve or thirteen travelling from Neustadt to Berlin to stay with his uncle, aunt and grandmother as well as his cousin Pony, who turns out to be a great character. Emil's father is dead and his mother supports them through hairdressing. She and Emil are very close and support each other unobtrusively or so they think. In some ways, this reflects Kästner's own situation. His father was around and was a saddle maker but it was his mother he was close to (perhaps suffocatingly so, judging by the letters he wrote to her from Leipzig and Berlin). She had been a housemaid but in her thirties she trained to be a hairdresser to supplement the family income.

Thus the money Emil is taking to Berlin to give to his grandmother, who lives with one daughter but also receives help from another, as well as to spend is not a great deal but means much to the family. They are not well off. When the villainous Max Grundeis takes advantage of Emil falling asleep and steals the money it is a tragedy and Emil chases after him. Alone and a little frightened in the big city he meets Gustav who proclaims his presence with a honk on an automobile horn he carries everywhere, then Gustav's friends who immediately form themselves into a group of detectives, lay out a plan and keep Grundeis under observation until he goes to the bank the following morning where he is confronted by Emil. There are wonderful descriptions of Berlin, of the food people consume and of the conversations they have. But above all, there are the children who form a bond of loyalty immediately and who work out a series of quite remarkable plans under the guidance of the Professor who spends a good deal of time imitating his father, a judge.

Kästner stayed in Germany through the Nazi period, deciding that emigration was not for him. He was interrogated by the Gestapo several times but not arrested and managed to earn some living by publishing books in Switzerland and at home under various pseudonyms. In 1944 he left Berlin to escape the the final Soviet onslaught and his flat was bombed while he was in the country. After the war he settled in Munich but for one reason and another (the latter being alcohol consumption) he wrote less and was known as a children's writer for which he received a number of decorations including, in 1960, the most prestigious of all: the Hans Christian Medal for writing. He died in 1974 and while his career as a journalist, adult novelist (just one book) and poet may not be well known, his child characters live on in many countries, in many languages and for many generations.

Let me end on a happier note: part of the research consisted of me taking another look at Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine books. I was going to add a few paragraphs about them but have really run out of space. Nevertheless, I shall return to the Lone Pine books. They deserve reprinting and re-reading, also reading for the first time. There is a curious parallel between the characters of the very English Lone Pine books written by the very English and somewhat conservative Malcolm Saville and the very German children of Emil and the Detectives.

Tuesday Night Bloggers: Children as witnesses and victims

I came across Mabel Esther Allan's Murder At The Flood by accident in a second hand bookshop and was attracted by the title with its echoes of Christie as well as the placing of the story, a huge flood in a Norfolk village (based on the devastating floods of 1953) with its echo of Sayers and Nine Tailors.

The book was published by a firm I had never heard of, Greyladies, which is an imprint of The Old Children's Bookshelf, a children's bookshop in Edinburgh. Altogether an intriguing set-up. They publish what they call "Well-Mannered Books by Ladies Long Gone", reprinting novels fallen into oblivion or never published in the first place. Among them are detective stories by children's writers, such as Noel Streatfield and Mabel Esther Allan who was extremely prolific under her own name and pseudonyms, writing stories about schools (usually rather advanced coeducational ones), ballet and many other subjects that would interest children and teenagers. Often they had a detective or mystery flavour to them, as children's books in those days tended to.

Doing some superficial research for this posting I found that there is some interest in Mabel Esther Allan out there on the internet.

There is a website called The Mabel Project, which set out to cover all Mabel Esther Allan's books but seems to have lasted only two years though it is meant to be a "long-term" project so it might be resurrected.


There is a website dedicated to her papers that are in the de Grummond Children's Literature Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi, something else I knew nothing about. This tells us that she was the author of over 170 published novels for children and what we are supposed to call young adults but I still call teenagers because adults of any kind they are not. There were some privately published books (how lowly that sounded then and yet how important it has become), four volumes of autobiography and eight unpublished novels. Some of these must be for adults.

Murder At The Flood, originally published in 1957, was reprinted in 2009 and is described as Mabel Esther Allan's only published novel for adults. Fantastic Fiction tells me that in 2011 Greyladies published another of her adult detective novels, Death Goes To Italy and from the publisher's own website I learn that Death Goes Dancing, which combines Ms Allan's love for and interest in ballet with a detective plot was published in 2014. Apparently she wrote only three detective stories, all in the fifties and only one of those was published in her lifetime. Rather a pity if Murder At The Flood is anything to go by.

Time to turn to the book and the children in it. As one would expect from an experienced writer for children and teenagers, the author does not simplify either their characters or, most importantly, their relationship to the world around them especially their families and other adults. They are both witnesses in different ways and one of them ends up being a victim.

The story is told from the point of view of the vicar's wife though it is in the third person. She is also a detective story writer though the village does not know this and this becomes the subject of possible blackmail by the man who, understandably, becomes the first corpse. As the story progresses we find out, naturally enough, that he had several victims or potential victims, people he was just approaching. Some of the blackmailable "offences" seem rather silly even by the standards of small Norfolk village of the 1950s, others more important. The one basic problem is that Thomas Long, the blackmailer and first murder victim, is also a malevolent drunkard who could not control either his tongue or his behaviour. This is hardly the stuff blackmailers are made of but his body is found at the end of chapter one and we do not really see him in action.

The flood and the village's behaviour are not dissimilar from those we find in Nine Tailors but while Sayers described the creation of a microcosm that is almost utopian, led by the near-saintly rector, the church and the vicarage is filled with the inevitable dirt, smells, wailing children, complaining old women and, as the news of the first and the second murder spread, pure nastiness. It would seem Mabel Esther Allan did not have a high opinion of humanity, not even in pretty villages set in lovely countryside.

Perhaps she had a low opinion only of adults; the two children are sympathetic characters. Betony Long, daughter of the victim is a bright girl with a deep love of poetry who has been bullied and abused by her father, whom she hates, and stifled by her mother whom she adores. In her early teens, she has been a witness to far too much and is finding it more and more difficult to cope even with the help and support of Emily Varney, the vicar's wife. She knows about violence, anger and hatred; and she knows about profound unhappiness. She is, as we find out at the end, a witness to the murder itself and that destroys her inside before she, in turn, is killed by the murderer.

The other child is Peter Love, the doctor's son, clearly brighter than his contemporaries and many adults who treat him with the sort of condescension that seems to have been the norm but not brighter than his father. That makes an enormous difference between him and the unhappy Betony. He is a witness at several crucial moments. He finds Thomas Long's body and proclaims that fact in the church as people are arriving from their flooded houses. Those who had known about the body had thought to keep it quiet for the time being but Peter puts an end to that and, unintentionally, starts all the vicious gossip about who might have killed the man.

Peter finds a letter that the vicar had dropped, which is taken rather swiftly from him by the self-important Mr Pyke who is "investigating" the crime and is putting everybody's back up. Nobody is too surprised when his dead body is found.

Finally, it is Peter who directs Emily's attention to a pile of very damp books among which Mr Pyke had been rooting not long before his death and where he found some crucial information. Emily finds it, too, but, in some ways, it is too late. Undoubtedly, Peter Love is going to do well at his school but whether he will become a detective is unknown.

In many ways this is a grim tale though there is a happy and summer flower filled last chapter and, in particular, the life and fate of children is not shown as being particularly rosy. One can but hope that Richard and Emily Varney, whose first child is due a few months after the last chapter, will have learnt some lessons.

Tuesday Night Bloggers: Children as witnesses to crime

Yes, dear readers, we are back. The Tuesday Night Bloggers had a month off and are back with the creepy theme of Children in Crime. That could be anything: children as detectives (and this may be a good time to re-read some Enid Blyton and Malcolm Saville), children as victims (tends to be very grim), children as criminals (from Fagin's gang to The Bad Seed) and children as witnesses. I am being a little lazy and turning to the obvious source, Agatha Christie.

Famously, Christie was no respecter of persons. Anybody could be a victim and anybody could be a criminal though she was writing at a time when some decencies were kept by most writers. I am a great fan of Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver books but one knows for certain that the young and not so young couples are going to turn out to be innocent. Not so with Christie. Nothing of the kind can be assumed. That nice young man who sits opposite you on a train or an aeroplane? I wouldn't trust him any further than I could throw him. The delightful young lady who appears to be victimized by nasty bullies? Make sure you do not stand between her and a fortune.

There is no protection for children in any way. Most readers can remember the child victims of Hallowe'en Night (1969) but what of the boy who cleans windows in Murder is Easy (1939) and the very ordinary girl guide in Body in the Library (1942)? All disposable. One particularly grim but excellent novel has a child of about twelve as the murderer and I am not stupid enough to tell you which one it is.


In this posting I intend to look at one of Christie's books in which children are witnesses to a series of crimes, which take place in Meadowbank, a very select and highly regarded girls' school, Cat Among The Pigeons.

The slightly chaotic plot starts in Meadowbank school, moves to Ramat, a fictional Middle Eastern country where a routine coup is taking place, the prince is being flown out with his personal pilot and British tourists are being shepherded out by harassed embassy officials and returns to Meadowbank with few necessary interruptions. The start is the first day of term with new girls arriving, being assigned to rooms and unpacked with their parents handled firmly if tactfully. The headmistress, Miss Bulstrode, temporarily distracted by the unexpected appearance by the dipsomaniac Lady Veronica Carlton-Sandways (Christie had a good ear for names and no respect for the aristocracy) misses something the very sensible Mrs Upjohn says, something that she will much regret missing.

Missing and not noticing things is one of the novel's themes: Miss Bulstrode misses Mrs Upjohn's story, Adam Goodman the gardener at the school (who is neither Adam Goodman nor a gardener but a Special Branch agent sent by our old friend Colonel Pikeaway) does not notice Princess Shaista's knees thus causing Poirot annoyance and Jennifer Sutcliffe manages not to notice anything while believing anything anybody tells her at any time. One cannot help wondering what possessed Miss Bulstrode to give such a dimwitted child one of the school's much sought after places.

On the other hand there is Julia Upjohn, daughter of the woman whose story Miss Bulstrode misses at the beginning, who has, as her mother says, quite a good brain. She notices things and, more to the point, she puts two and two together, getting four, which puts her ahead of the police and Special Branch. It is something of a truism in numerous detective stories that children have sharper eyes and ears and often notice things that adults miss. Not in this novel: Jennifer is positively deaf and blind while Julia works out things because she has extra information purely because of her friendship with Jennifer. No adult could have worked it out where the jewels (not a secret, as it happens) might have been.

When she does find them she very sensibly takes them to Poirot, knowing about him from Maureen Summerhayes of Mrs McGinty Is Dead, who happens to be her mother's friend. She explains to George, Poirot's servant that she has come to talk about some murders and a robbery and adds to Poirot himself that there is also the kidnapping but she does not think that is her business. Naturally, Poirot is fascinated but he had already read a certain amount of what has been going on at Meadowbank in the newspapers, which have been carefully refolded.

The kidnapping is that of Princess Shaista and the trick is the same Christie had used in The Girdle of Hyppolita, one of The Labours of Hercules. In that story Miss Pope, the headmistress of what is little more than a finishing school, is treated with amused irony; Miss Bulstrode is taken far more seriously as is her school. The differentiation is quite interesting as Christie herself did not attend a school at all and is usually seen as someone who held somewhat old-fashioned views about women's education and careers. As ever, she manages to confound the various assumptions made by critics about her.

In fact, headmistresses apart from Miss Pope are seen as highly intelligent and knowledgeable. Poirot asks the advice of Miss Emlyn in Hallowe'en Party and it is absolutely sound. She knows exactly who can and who cannot be trusted. More than that she is the only person who understands the significance of one particular detail about the party and urges the witness to tell Poirot who also works out from that who the killer must have been. None of the children, one may add, have noticed anything. So much for their sharp eyes. Miss Emlyn is also an old friend of Miss Bulstode who has, by the time of of Hallowe'en Party retired (she is on the verge of it in Cat Among The Pigeons) but the Meadowbank has gone on, changed but also with its traditions.

Poirot also consults Miss Battersby, the former Principal of Meadowfield school and present tutor of mathematics, in The Third Girl. Again, he receives a no-nonsense, accurate assessment of the girl Norma Restarick and her family. Altogether, headmistresses are a good thing in Agatha Christie's novel.

Cat Among The Pigeons ends with a different child, the boy Allen, son of the late Prince Ali Yusuf, whose life is about to change drastically as his mother inherits the jewels that had been put aside for her. Julia Upjohn acquires one emerald, green for mystery. It is no more than she deserves.

Books I have been reading: Qiu Xiaolong - Don't Cry Tai Lake

I first came across Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen novels some years ago when the first six were published in the UK very soon after they had come out in the US. I read The Loyal Character Dancer and liked it for several reasons. The basic plot was good though at various times there was a definite collapse of logical development and it seemed to give a very good idea of what it was like to live and work in Shanghai in the late eighties or early nineties still oppressed with memories of such horrible events as the Cultural Revolution and the subsequent enforced exodus of young people to the villages.

Chen, the son of an intellectual, too young to have been affected directly by those events, a poet who had been directed into the police force after graduation and who then to his own surprise found that he was quite good at it, was an interesting character. After that I read the first of the series, Death of a Red Heroine, which was excellent with a shocking but entirely credible ending. To this day I think that is by far the best book of the series, with A Case of Two Cities close second.

Qiu Xiaolong left China in 1988 to take up a fellowship in St Louis, Missouri, where he was working on T. S. Eliot as well as writing his own poetry. Then came the events of Tiananmen Square [surely, no link required] and he, with his family, decided to stay in the US, where he has continued to write in English and Chinese. So the detective novels were written from outside the country, based on memory, knowledge of history and, one must assume, information from people who are still there. Only one of his novels has been translated into Chinese and it was severely bowdlerized with all references to Shanghai removed. Not surprisingly, it was not a success. The books are available in Beijing in English but only in the English language bookshop and one cannot help wondering who shops there. (I know this from someone who did go there and did buy one of the novels.)

The series continued but, in my opinion, began to lose steam, possibly because of the distance from the place about which the author was writing. The links with the Maoist past remained fascinating but the plots became far too convoluted and Chen's own character far too neurotic. He kept having nervous break-downs, not eating (though he is supposed to be a great expert on food and a gourmet), and generally being unable to decide what he wanted to do with himself.

In The Mao Case, a very promising plot collapses right at the end because of Chen's completely incredible actions. After that, no Chen book seemed to appear in the UK and I assumed that Qiu Xiaolong had decided that the series had come to a full stop and turned his attention to other writings.

How wrong one can be. Three more books were published not very long after The Mao Case but none of them came out in the UK until last year so it seemed as if there had been a longish gap. I have now read the first of that trio, Don't Cry Tai Lake, which also takes place in a real place on the shore of the eponymous lake and appears to deal with the horrific pollution problems there.

This book and, I assume, the two that follow it deal with present day China (well, late nineties so not quite present day) without any direct references to the Maoist past. Does Qiu Xiaolong intend to write six of these? An intriguing idea.

Chief Inspector Chen who, I am glad to say, is back to being a gourmet and addicted to good food, is now legendary in police circles and definitely a promising young cadre who is being pushed forward by an important Party boss in Beijing. Other party officials do not like him and hope to prevent his rise through the nomenclatura. This has been the situation more or less for several books and one cannot help thinking that it is time we moved on and saw him moving upward or definitively being pushed out of that track.

Here he is told to take up a holiday in a remarkably luxurious High Cadre Centre on the lake and, as a side issue, think of producing a report about local conditions, which would be very useful to his career. A little bemused he does as he is told and starts working on his report as well as on some poetry. Then he meets and falls in love with a young environmental activist and decides to use her information as part of the report, because he thinks that the truth of what is happening in and around the heavily polluted and infected lake should be known.

Discussions wobble. Someone points out that at least now people have enough to eat and are getting richer but, as Chen replies, at some cost to the environment (and themselves with many diseases and inedible food). There are many references to the new China where people just want to get rich without caring about anything or anyone around them but it is quite clear that the pollution goes back many decades. As ever, it started under the Communist system and it is the continuance of that system in one form or another that has allowed the situation to deteriorate so much.

Then the director of one of the most polluting factories that is about to become private is murdered and the Internal Security uses the event to arrest a young man who is an even better known environmental activist and have their eye on Shanshan, the girl Chen is in love with. Naturally, he becomes involved in the investigation with the sub rosa help of the local police sergeant who is thrilled to be working with the great Chief Inspector Chen.

In fact, that murder and detective plot is very good and follows a classic Golden Age pattern. Unfortunately, it turns out to have nothing to do with the pollution motif, so the chapters devoted to ranting about that become superfluous. The poetry Chen writes is rather good but his habit of endlessly quoting his own and others' lines and sayings becomes tedious. He solves the case but his own future remains undecided. Once again he loses the girl and his apparent status as a young promising cadre stays stationary. I cannot help hoping that somewhere in the novels after Don't Cry Tai Lake there is some resolution to at least one of Chief Inspector Chen's personal dilemmas.

Tuesday Night Bloggers: The Norths face poisoners and the cases are screwy

 The Norths are screwy. Everyone knows this though they are not aware of that. Their friend, Lieutenant (sometimes acting Captain) Bill Weigand knows they are screwy. Sergeant Mullins not only knows but says so. Frequently. And Bill always replies with one word: "Right". Dorian Weigand, the artist, knows they are screwy. She knows that going away with Pamela on one of her wild goose chases is likely to be dangerous but she always goes. Once she takes an automatic with her. Her husband, Bill, had insisted she acquired a small automatic and took it with her whenever she went off with Pam North on one of those wild goose chases, just in case they end up in trouble. Deep trouble. They do end up in trouble. Deep trouble. The automatic is taken away from Dorian by a man who has already killed two people and who turns out to be a spy as well.

Inspector Artemus O'Malley knows they are screwy and every case they are involved in will turn into a screwy one even if it does not start out that way. The Inspector (Artie) does not want the Norths in any case. He likes quick, easy solutions. Somehow, he never gets them and the Norths are always in Bill Weigand's cases. You'd think Lower West or (sometimes) Lower East in Manhattan would have crimes that did not affect the Norths in any way but they do not. The Norths are always there and if they are there they will get involved.

Take these three poisoning stories, one, Murder Within Murder, immediately after the war, one, Murder Comes First, in 1951, during the atomic espionage crises, and one, Death of an Angel, in 1956, with life back to normal. Whatever normal might be.

In the first one, the victim, Miss Gipson, has been employed as a researcher by Jerry North's firm, North Books Inc. Miss Gipson is poisoned by sodium fluoride, which has been substituted in one of the capsules of her normal digestive powders. The description of Miss Gipson's last meal in a tea shop explains the need for those digestive powders. Naturally, Bill Weigand has to call Jerry and Jerry has to go along to identify Miss Gipson and Pam goes with him. Then she has ideas. Naturally.

In the second one the poison is cyanide and it has been put into one of Grace Logan's vitamin capsules, thus turning it from "concentrated health" into concentrated death. Pam North's aunts happen to be present and one of them is a possible suspect. Naturally, they rush to the scene and become heavily involved in trying to rescue Aunt Thelma though later on it is Aunt Lucinda who needs rescuing. Well, Pam becomes heavily involved and drags Dorian Weigand with her.

In the third one their involvement is a little less direct. On Thursday there is a party to celebrate a significant milestone in the run of the play written by one of Jerry North's authors. At Bradley Fitch's spectacular apartment. On Friday, Fitch has another party, a stag party, because in the meantime he has become engaged to the star of the play. On Saturday morning Brad Fitch has a monumental hangover. He is given a monumental hangover cure in a glass together with oxalic acid in it. Not only had the Norths seen him at the first party and knew many of the suspects, one of their cocktail napkins is found in the room Fitch died. Naturally, Bill Weigand has to talk to them and they become involved. Naturally.

Jerry North is less screwy than Pam. After all, he runs a successful publishing business. Judging by the amount of money they must spend on eating and drinking in very expensive restaurants and bars, on taxis and on Pam's outfits, the publishing firm must be very successful, indeed.

Pam North is very screwy. Everybody thinks so. At first people find her way of talking - short sentences with no apparent connection between them and ideas leaping like a salmon - quite hard. Then they get used to it and seem to like it. Except Inspector O'Malley. He never gets used to it. He never learns to like it. Or them.


Pam's whole family is like that. They all leap from subject to subject and make connections that nobody else can see. Her nieces are like that but need to practise a bit. Her aunts are so good at it that they flummox even Pam. Sometimes those leaps go towards solving the murder. Sometimes they just go off into the distance. In Death of an Angel she gets it completely wrong. In Murder Comes First she works it out correctly and the reader is even given the clue that sets her on the right path.In Murder Within Murder she gets it generally right, as she says, and goes to the right family. Otherwise she is wrong.

Often she rushes off to confront a murderer, sometimes not realizing that it is the murderer she is confronting. Then she has to be rescued by Bill Weigand and Jerry North. She promises not to do anything stupid again. Right, they all say. They know that Pam will do it again and there will be many more screwy Mr and Mrs North adventures.

Tuesday Night Bloggers: Poison through the skin

'Tis the month of July, named after Julius Caesar as it was the month of his birth (but not of his death as we all know very well). Despite that we are not dealing with stabbings or conspiracies but with poisonings of various kind. As ever Bev Hankins will be collecting the links and, I believe, she created this logo, basing it on an unduly racy cover for a Mr and Mrs North book. I have read several of the Lockridge novels about the Norths but do not recall anything quite like this in any of the plots. But it is a great cover.

So, poisons and poisonings. Obviously, the queen of those as of so many other things is Agatha Christie who probably killed more people by more kinds of poison than anybody else. In Bloody Murder Julian Symons suggested that there may have been something odd about Dame Agatha's mentality as she could write quite such a lot about so many different kinds of poison. As so often, I disagree with the great Mr Symons.

Christie worked in a hospital dispensary in both World Wars and, consequently, knew a fair amount about drugs and their poisonous quality. She also wrote, mostly, domestic crime stories and poison is, on the whole, easier to obtain and to use in those circumstances. Why, one wonders, did Mr Symons not think that there might be something wrong with P. D. James's mentality, though in two novels a murder was committed by the killer grabbing the victim from behind and cutting the victim's throat.

Poison can and is administered through food and drink, through injections, through nasal or perfume sprays (in one of Ngaio Marsh's novels) and through the skin, which is a particularly nasty and unusual way of disposing of someone. Christie mentions the possibility of slow-acting poison in A Caribbean Mystery. Mr Rafiel's nurse and masseur is seen investigating Molly Kendall's face cream after which he talks vaguely about the possibility of affecting people mind, memory and imagination through poisoned unguents. Some of the witches really did believe they flew through the air and consorted with Beelzebub, he explains, as a result of rubbing belladonna into their skin.

In fact, the attempts on Molly's life are far more straightforward but the tricks played on her mind, probably through those creams are part of the plot.

In Cards on the Table a past murder is mentioned through the medium of a poisoned shaving brush, which, one must assume, could pass the poison into the skin.

The only novel by Christie in which someone is killed through a poisoned body unguent is Death Comes as the End, her mystery set in ancient Egypt. (In parenthesis, it might be noted that this ws one of the first examples of history detective stories, so popular nowadays.) Esa, mother of Imhotep, a wise old woman who realizes that the various deaths should be attributed to human rather than ghostly agency is careful with her food and drink but forgets that creams and unguents can be poisoned as well.

Then there is Edmund Crispin's Swan Song, the first novel that takes place after the war, which centres on the first performance of Die Meistersingers since before the war. There are two murders, one being an impossible one, and two attempted ones with a highly complicated solution that involves Fen using a skeleton to prove his point.

The interesting thing is that one of the murders where the victim is not the intended one, is carried out through the medium of theatrical removal cream, saturated with arsenic. The intended victim would have gone to a doctor thus preventing his own death but the unfortunate and accidental real victim does not want to do so for reasons of his own. So he dies in some pain but, really, it does not matter as he would probably have been hanged otherwise.

Tuesday Night Bloggers: Elegies and Evening Classes

Taking time off from Brexit and all its problems, I turn once again to murder and education, this time to murder in the Extra-Mural Department of the university in Bantwich, a city that bears some resemblance to Liverpool, where the author of Words for Murder Perhaps, Edward Candy or, in reality, Barbra Alison Neville (née Bodson) attended evening classes at the Royal Institution at one stage of her varied career.

The novel, first published in 1971, is not nearly well known enough though it was republished in 1985 by The Hogarth Press. It is a highly literate novel with an excellent plot in which people who share names with addressees of well known poetical elegies, human and feline, are killed off. Could it be someone obsessed with this rather dark but beautiful form of poetry? Could it be Mr Roberts, lecturer in English Literature and part-time tutor in the Extra-Mural Department, who has unexpectedly decided to give a course on Crime Fiction, Past and Present? Certainly Inspector Hunt, who cannot quite make up his mind whether he feels inferior to all these intellectuals he has to talk to or not, is inclined to think so.

After all, the first person to disappear is William Harvey, namesake of the famous Dr William Hervey or Harvey to whom Abraham Cowley addressed a fine elegy. The Bill Harvey of the novel is a more successful labourer in the Eng. Lit. field than Gregory Roberts who had, moreover, walked off with the latter's wife, thus causing a nervous break-down. No wonder Inspector Hunt becomes interested though he can prove nothing and other bodies multiply, each accompanied by a quotation from the appropriate elegy. Arthur Hallam, an Egyptologist, is poisoned and lines from Tennyson's In Memoriam are quoted; a young man, called Edward King is knifed and reference is made to Milton's Lycidas; even a cat is found drowned in a gold fish tank and the killer (as we know by then) writes out a line from Thomas Gray's Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes.

What makes the novel pleasant to read is that, while there are a great many literary allusions, to elegies and to novels of crime, there are adequate explanations of the more obscure ones. In general, the description of the Department and its denizens, the swiftly drawn portraits of many characters and the clever description of police procedures and the relationship between Inspector Hunt and Superintendent Burnivel, who had appeared in Edward Candy's previous novels, are all excellent.

There is, however, one problem: there are no clues for the reader. But none. We know about the elegies, we know that Roberts, though a somewhat nervous person with a load to carry from the past, probably did not do it (no Christie, this), we know that there are some other shenanigans going on in the Department but what we do not know and do not find out until the very end is any connection between the characters who appear in the novel and the victims. Even when the killer's name is pronounced by someone in some other connection and the Superintendent reacts unexpectedly, we do not know why. What is it about that person's name that has sent Burnivel helter-skelter in pursuit? And that is something of a fly in the ointment.

Tuesday Night Bloggers: Gervase Fen makes his appearance

Well, here we are back with murder and education than which there cannot be a more obvious link. And talking of links, Bev Hankins is collecting them all on her blog, My Reader's Block.

So, Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature, a man who is extraordinarily knowledgeable about English literature and many other things. His outward appearance, with the ruddy face and the spiky brown hair that is slicked down with water but fights back, appears in all the books. He shuffles and fidgets when he is bored, he is rude to everyone unless he happens to feel particularly sorry for them, he goes through various stages of sulking, boredom, excitement and an uncontrolled desire to quote from Lewis Carroll in every investigation.

The first one, The Case of the Gilded Fly, published in 1944 and taking place in October 1940, also tells us a lot about his personality.

Nigel [the Watson of this novel, a journalist on holiday] reflected, as he turned in St Christopher's at twenty to six that evening, that there was something extraordinarily school-boyish about Gervase Fen. Cherubic, naive, volatile, and entirely delightful, he wandered the earth taking a genuine interest in things and people unfamiliar, while maintaining a proper sense of authority in connection with his own subject. On literature his comments were acute, penetrating and extremely sophisticated; on any other topic he invariably pretended complete ignorance and an anxious willingness to be instructed, though it generally came out eventually that he knew more about it than his interlocutor, for his reading, in the forty-two years since his first appearance on this planet, had been systematic and enormous.

If this ingenuousness had been affectation, or merely arrested development, it would have been simply irritating; but it was perfectly sincere, and derived from the genuine intellectual humility of a man who has read much and in so doing has been able to contemplate the enormous spaces of knowledge which must inevitably always lie beyond his reach. In temperament he was incurably romantic, though he ordered his life in a rigidly reasonable way. to men and affairs, his attitude was neither cynical nor optimistic, but one of never-failing fascination. this resulted in a sort of unconscious amoralism, since he was always so interested in what people were doing, and why they were doing it, that it never occurred to him to assess the morality of their action.

In fact, Fen spends several chapters wondering whether he should tell the police who the murderer is, something he had worked out within a few minutes of finding the body. The victim had been a poisonous creature and the murderer is, in many ways, an admirable one. What to do? The problem is solved by the murderer who repeats the crime in a far more gruesome fashion with and an innocuous victim. Fen decides that justice must take its course.

The plot takes place mostly in Fen's college, St Christopher's, which has a surprising affinity with St John's, where Crispin or, rather, Bruce Montgomery, had been an undergraduate and organist. Not all the novels or short stories do take place there but several include it, as well as the theatre and Oxford in general, together with the appalling railway system.

Crispin was a great admirer of John Dickson Carr and this, his first novel, was a "locked room" or "impossible" killing. The solution, which Fen realizes a little later than he would have liked, is not entirely credible but that matters little. What is of far greater interest is the reason why the shot is not heard (apart from the inevitable silencer): two young men are listening to the radio, the Third Programme, to be specific, where very loud music is being played. The music is the Overture to Die Meistersingers, which is followed by Ein Heldenleben. These are staples of concerts nowadays but did the BBC really broadcast music by Wagner and Richard Strauss in October 1940, the height of the Blitz? I presume, Bruce Montgomery, the musician, knew whereof he wrote but I still find it hard to believe.

There are other interesting aspects in this novel, some to appear in later work, some not. There is Fen's relationship with the Chief Constable, Sir Richard Freeman, who is an amateur but highly regarded literary critic, while Fen is an amateur and highly regarded detective, the only literary critic who is also a detective in fiction, as he puts it. Each prefers to discuss their own amateur and the other's professional work and each is periodically thwarted, except that Fen does actually solve cases, as is mentioned in The Case of the Gilded Fly. Indeed, he solves this one, causing himself and others great unhappiness.

Crispin also steps outside the conventions of the detective novel slightly by having Fen gloomily hope that Gideon Fell will never hear of his slowness in recognizing a clue. In subsequent books there will be bolder conversations between author and character and hilarious references to the publisher.

Then there is Dolly Fen, Gervase's very practical and down to earth wife with whom he has several children. Dolly and the children are referred to in other novels and short stories but never really appear again, which is rather a pity. She is a delightful character who keeps him under some sort of control and whose opinion he values highly.

And finally, the references to English literature and, especially, Shakespeare. It is hard to get through these witty novels without having to look up at least one reference, maybe more. In some ways these books are even harder work than Sayers's, also full of quotations and allusions. The gilded fly? It's from Act 4. Scene 6 of King Lear:

Ay, every inch a king:When I do stare, see how the subject quakes.I pardon that man's life. What was thy cause? Adultery?Thou shalt not die: die for adultery! No:The wren goes to 't, and the small gilded flyDoes lecher in my sight.Let copulation thrive; for Gloucester's bastard sonWas kinder to his father than my daughtersGot 'tween the lawful sheets.

Tuesday Night Bloggers: Is this where it started?

This month's theme is murder and education - schools, colleges, academics and other animals. Bev Hankins is collecting them on her blog and I hope that my late (as usual) essay will be accepted. Honestly, the cat sat on it and I could not do any work.

What is it about academics and detective stories? The question has been asked on numerous occasions and noted sourly or with amusement even more often. At the end of Edmund Crispin's Love Lies Bleeding, which takes place in a school (well, two schools, really) rather than a college, Professor Gervase Fen (one of my favourite sleuths but more of that in the next posting) wants to tell his friend Horatio Stanford, the Headmaster of Castrevenford School, about his idea for a rather exciting detective story (not like those insipid ones written by Edmund Crispin) but Dr Stanford is not persuaded:

"Oh Gervase," he said, "if you must write a detective story - and far too many dons write them as it is - why not use the events of this week-end?"

This, naturally, is dismissed by Fen as being piffle. He wants to write about a girl in the Catskill Mountains. So far as we know, he never does, which is just as well. His friend puts his finger on something important: far too many dons write detective stories.

That is still true though with the various reforms in higher education has taken away a good deal of their spare time. You cannot write too many detective stories if you have to fill in forms and deal with administrative matters. But back in the good old days ....

As far as I can tell the first person to note the link between academia and detective stories was Marjorie Nicolson, the first woman President of Phi Beta Kappa among other achievements. She it was, who in April 1929 published a sharp-eyed essay in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled The Professor and the Detective. In it she dealt with the dual question of why academics like reading and writing detective stories so much, insisting that it was not about escape from life. Au contraire.

Yes, the detecitve story does constitute escape, but it is escape not from life, but from literature. We grant willingly that we find in it release. Our 'revolt' - so mysteriously explained by the psychologists - is simple enough: we have revolted from an excessive subjectivity to welcome objewctivity; from long-drawn-out dissections of emotion to straightforward appeal to intellect; from reiterated emphasis upon men and women as victims either of circumstances or of their glands to a suggestion that men and women may consciously plot and consciously plan; from the 'stream of consciousness' which threatends to engulf us in it Lethean montony to analystes of purpose, controlled and directed by a thinking mind; from formlessness to form; from the sophomoric to the mature; most of all from a smart and easy pessimist which interprets men and the universe in terms of unmoral purposelessness to a rebelief in a universe governed by cause and effect. All this we find in the detective story.

So, no, it is not simply an expression of the basic futile nastiness that envelops academic life.

Marjorie Nicolson also adds that the new form is being turned into art, which may produce classics, and among them are

... Oxford and Cambride gons, a distinguished economist, a supposedly distinguished aesthetician (we have only his pseudonymous rod for his identity), an historian, and a scientist...

I assume the economist is G. D. H. Cole, who had already started writing his detective stories as well as his works of economics but the others are a little vague, though later on she might have listed J. C. Masterman as one of the distinguished Oxford dons, author of An Oxford Tragedy, published in 1933 and of the slightly odd The Case of the Four Friends, published in 1957. Masterman was also immensely influential in the world of intelligence but that is another story.

So far as I can make out An Oxford Tragedy is the first detective story that takes place actually inside an Oxford college, St Thomas's in this case. Julian Symons certainly dismissed Michael Innes's claims to have invented the sub-genre in Death at the President's Lodging, by pointing to Masterman's novel. Indeed, the first Appleby story in which he comes back to Oxford to investigate the rather convoluted murder of the President of St Anthony's College, was not published till 1936. (I think we can dismiss that charming pretence that the events of the novel take place in some weird place, called the University of Bletchley, the one created by undergraduates escaping from Oxford, who did not get as far as Cambridge. Nobody who has ever spent any time in Oxford can fail to recognize the place in Innes's first novel.)

To use Symons's classification, Appleby is a farceur. The novels about him tend to be complicated, full of ridiculous converstaions and even more ridiculous characters. Death at the President's Lodging is no exception. Appleby refers several times to the strange and subtle working of the most brilliant minds that have collected in St Anthony's College but as one deciphers their actual thinking and behaviour, one cannot help being struck by the sheer foolishness of these highly regarded dons.

Not so with An Oxford Tragedy. For one thing, it is written from inside, by the Senior Tutor and Vice President, a more or less contented man who has clearly not made much of a mark, academically speaking. It is notable that Masterman was an Oxford don when he wrote the novel whereas Innes (or J. I. M. Stewart, to give him his real name) was an academic in various universities, not returning to Oxford till 1949. His convoluted farcical situation was produced from outside and his detective, Inspector Appleby, is also an outsider though he had studied in one of the colleges. Masterman, on the other hand, sees the tragedy that might be inherent in the somewhat closed life led by dons in a college.

Masterman's narrator is an insider but his detective is far more of an outsider than Appleby is: Dr Ernst Brendel, a Viennese lawyer and criminologist, who sometimes acts as an amateur detective. He speaks English very well but many of his attitudes and approaches are hopeless Continental, which is what enables him to solve the slightly ridiculous puzzle very quickly. Left to themselves, one feels the dons and the police would have gone on floundering.

It is in the two endings that the books differ most considerably. The crime has been solved, despite the various obstructions, the murderer has duly committed suicide and the colleges try to pick up the pieces. St Anthony's, Michael Innes's college, will do so without the slightest difficulty and, indeed, we are due to meet one of the characters, Gott, clearly a rather amusing self-portrait, in the second novel, Hamlet, Revenge. Masterman's picture of a devastated college and tragically displaced lives is far more affecting - not really a farce, at all.

They are both academic books, to be read, savoured and cherished.

Tuesday Night Bloggers: Cars and Murder in 1935

This is the last of the May Tuesday Night blogs about travel and holiday. Next month we shall be covering academic institutions - plenty to choose from there.

I have chosen to write about something slightly unusual and that is a motor rally, partly because I am impressed by any writer who can hold my attention on any subject to do with cars, even those of the thirties and partly because John Rhode is a seriously underrated Golden Age author. Curt Evans has written about Cecil John Charles Street who was John Rhode as well as Miles Burton and it would be good to see some of the books back in print. The British Library is reprinting at least two of Miles Burton's books about Desmond Merrion and his talentless policeman friend, Inspector Arnold (this and this), but so far there is no sign of any John Rhode books.

This is all a matter of personal taste, of course, but I marginally prefer John Rhode's Dr Priestley to Burton's Desmond Merrion.

He is a scientist and mathematician though it is not always clear which but on all subjects he gets into ferocious arguments with his colleagues. Where his income is from remains a mystery as he does not hold down an academic position and his books are not exactly best sellers. A side line writing successful detective novels, perhaps? He is often rather annoyed by other people's stupidity and most people treat this characteristic with a pleasant shrug of the shoulder. Oh it's just the old man being his usual self.

There is a secretary-cum-assistant-cum-general slave, called Harold Merefield who is occasionally allowed to find things out for himself but only if he brings it all back like a good dog to the master. Actually, the relationship is a little odd. In the first book of the series, The Paddington Mystery, Harold is a young ne'er do well, who has squandered his money, fallen out with his father's friend, Dr Priestley, and, more importantly, his daughter April and is clearly sleeping with a woman who is not his wife. Well, naturally, he is suspected of murder. Dr Priestley sorts it all out and at the end of the book Harold is about to start working for him and to marry April. Thereafter April disappears. She is mentioned in the second book, I am told, as being on a round of family visits but never seen or heard of again. This I find slightly sinister. Has anyone thought of checking the garden or the basement of that large house in Westbourne Terrace?

John Rhode produced many books between the wars and afterwards as did Miles Burton. In 1935 he sent Harold Merefield off to be a navigator for a small team who have entered the Torquay Motor Rally that involves two people driving alternately for something like forty hours with hardly any stops. By the time our friends find the car that has crashed and left two dead bodies they can hardly stand or see straight themselves. As Sergeant Showerby says when he sees them, unshaven, exhausted, barely conscious: "Well, some folks have queer ways of enjoying themselves, that's all I can say."

Naturally, the accident turns out to be anything but and Dr Priestley has to sort things out again, though none of the young men are suspected of the murder. Other people are, though.

Wait a minute, I hear people cry, a motor rally? A motor rally? How does that fit into the pastoral, romantic, utopian golden age detective genre? Well, it doesn't because that is not what the genre was, regardless of what people who should know better say or think and regardless of TV dramatizations. Cecil Street was an engineer; he had also served in Royal Artillery. He was fascinated by matters to do with engineering, particularly electrical and motor cars. In fact he was responsible for Eric the Skull who lit up at meetings of the Detection Club.

The Motor Rally Mystery is all about times of driving and various aspects of car mechanics but also about the correct reading of clues, something that apparently only Dr Priestley is capable of. There are certain untraditional aspects to the book. The local police, both sergeant and inspector are really very intelligent though the three young men make snide comments about them. The coroner, on the other hand, is an ass. Superintendent Hanslet of Scotland Yard, a frequent character in the novels, is largely an idiot. He manages to invent several theories that he describes as facts on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. Hanslet's career is a mystery and I can only surmise that he progressed to Superintendent under the rule of Sir Henry Clithering as Commissioner.  That man was notoriously incapable of seeing the most obvious of clues.

The plot is a bit weak. There are clues galore but no explanation until the very end when there is a great car chase, a near crash and Dr Priestley pulls several rabbits out of a hat. One could also do with a few maps - three to be precise, that would show clearly which routes were followed by our team, which by the victims and which by the murderer.

The book ends with something of a threat. The owner of the Armstrong Siddeley Saloon intends to enter the following year's rally and wants Dr Priestley as the passenger. Will the organizers allow it?