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.
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