MacDonald introduces Colonel Anthony Gethryn, provides him with a vague secret service background during the war, gives him a love interest, and lets him do his thing.
Gethryn writes for a London weekly, The Owl, and has convenient connections among the police, the ex-military, and the gentlemen and ladies of the idle rich. The problem he tackles here is that the very likable secretary’s fingerprints are on the handle of the heavy wood-rasp that was used to kill his boss the Cabinet Minister, and everyone else seems to have an alibi. The other house guests include an M.P.
The book has some surprises. One is the most grisly description of a dead man’s head wounds I’ve read, even in much more recent books. The next thing we know, Gethryn has fallen for Her, and She gets capitalized pronouns when Gethryn is thinking about Her. She is a widow, Lucia Lemesereur, and her little sister is the beloved of the accused secretary, Alan Deacon, so Gethryn has extra motive for wanting to clear his future brother-in-law. There’s another romance in The Owl office which turns the book into a thriller a third of the way through: Gethryn’s editor realizes how much he loves his very efficient Girl Friday only when she is being menaced by a madman with a gun.
Gethryn is another one of those mystery heroes like Lord Peter Wimsey, Philip Trent, and Reggie Fortune, who can seem too flippant, if not completely empty-headed, to characters in the book, though we know them as brave and brilliant. The book’s most glaring flaw is an explanation—after the murderer has been exposed—that takes forty pages
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