UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Edmund Crispin [Robert Bruce Montgomery], The Moving Toyshop (1946)

             Richard Cadogan, the poet, is a friend of Gervase Fen, the Oxford professor who solves crimes (just as Philip Larkin, the poet and dedicatee of the book, was a friend of Bruce Montgomery, the Oxford don, who wrote mysteries. So, naturally, when Cadogan gets involved in a murder as he enters Oxford for a holiday, he goes to Fen for help.

            The plot is wearily complex and involves a series of heirs to a fortune, each identified by an Edward Lear limerick by the woman who is giving them her fortune because each of them does her some kindness and she doesn’t particularly like the relative who is the main heir. They all will inherit if the main heir fails to return to England and claim the fortune within a given time. Thus we have a motive. The lawyer handling all this decides to murder the main heir, and so do some of the alternates, more successfully.

            Fen’s eccentricities and the constant play with language and allusions make the book amusing, as do the activities of those Fen enlists to help him in the investigation.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: J. J. Connington, Mystery at Lynden Sands (1928)

Uncommon Mysteries is the heading I’m using for brief notes I’ve made about mysteries I found odd, or especially good, or memorable in some other way. Some of these notes were broadcast as fillers on a public radio station, WKMS, in Murray, Kentucky, a decade ago. Others are new.

J. J. Connington was the pseudonym of Alfred Walter Stewart. Stewart was a chemist and his seventeen novels about Sir Clinton Driffield (this is the fourth) often have scientific aspects; in this one the role of amyl nitrate in a murder is one issue, and there is a later ruse about hydrophobia and its serum.

            Driffield’s Watson is Wendover, whose first name is never given, but Driffield calls him “squire.” On a seaside golfing vacation at Lynden Sands, they encounter the murders of the caretaker of Foxhill, an unoccupied manor house near the resort hotel on the beach, and of a ne’er-do-well grifter who turns out to be the first husband, long thought to be dead, of Cressida Fleetwood, née Fordingbridge. Her family owns Foxhill, though there are questions about who is the current heir. A claimant has returned from the war and may or may not be the missing Derek Fordingbridge. Along with possible bigamy and murder, the plot includes embezzlement, a mysterious young Frenchwoman, and what appears to be a small gang of crooks living nearby.

            Steinbrunner and Penzler (Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection) compare Connington’s “meticulous plotting” with that of Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode. Driffield has a little of Holmes’s cold impersonality as well as a few of his put-downs: he says to Wendover after the latter has summed up the case, “Masterly survey, Squire. Except that you’ve left out most of the points of importance.”

            Mystery at Linden Sands is one of Martin Edwards’s examples of classic crime in The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, and Connington was one of T. S. Eliot’s favorite crime writers.