Fletcher, like his rival writers Edgar Wallace and E. Phillips Oppenheim, was remarkably prolific. All three wrote more than a hundred mysteries each. The Middle Temple Murder (1919) was nearly contemporary with Oppenheim’s The Great Impersonation (1920) and Wallace’s The Mind of Mr J. G. Reeder (1925), and these three books are often considered as the best of their respective authors.
Frank Spargo, sub-editor at the London daily Watchman, happens upon a recently discovered body in Middle Temple Lane one night. Later the name and address of Spargo’s young barrister friend Ronald Breton shows up as the only thing in the pockets of the dead man. Together Spargo, Breton, and a remarkably cooperative Scotland Yard detective named Rathbury investigate, but it is Spargo who takes the lead. Spargo uses his daily features in the Watchman to crowd-source additional information about the murder.
The investigation takes Spargo to Market Milcaster and a famous case of embezzlement tried there, and eventually to the wild moorlands of Yorkshire, where three of the principals in the case are gathered. The solution to the puzzle comes suddenly, and equally suddenly the book ends, without a rehashing or rationalizing of what happened and how—we can guess why. The plot first thickens when the father of Breton’s fiancée—and her sister, the girl in whom Spargo’s interest is growing—seems to be implicated and not exactly who he pretends to be. Gradually we learn who the murdered man was and who his associates were. Nothing the investigators learn is concealed from the reader—this much is in agreement with Golden Age mystery practice—but this 1919 story moves more like a police procedural, even though Spargo is not officially a policeman.
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