The Case of the
Corporal's Leave (1945) is Christopher
Bush's twenty-ninth mystery novel about his two detectives,
Ludovic Travers and Superintendent George Wharton, which is one of
his wartime stories and takes place after Travers was "invalided
out of the Army in the autumn of 1943" – now worked on "Special Branch jobs" for an overworked Scotland Yard. My
reason for picking this particular title is its tantalizing premise.
The story opens with Travers confessing that he had committed "what
was tantamount to murder" and it will not be till the story is
almost over that "you learn how and why."
The Case of the
Corporal's Leave begins when Travers reported to Scotland Yard
and found Wharton in "in one of his heavy, preoccupied moods."
What harried his mind was the sudden disappearance of a retired "Big
Bug" of the India Office.
Sir William Pelle is a
retired Indian Civil Servant, who has recently taken over the
secretaryship of the gifts branch of the Indian Famine Relief Fund,
which came with the custodianship over "various items of
jewellery" that were gifted to the fund and he was going to
have them appraised by a noted antique dealer, Francis Kenray –
toting the expensive gifts around in a small attaché-case. Assuming
nobody would think that ordinary-looking little case was crammed with
at least thirty thousand pounds worth of jewellery.
However, Sir William
failed to show up for his appointment with Kenray. He had disappeared
without a trace along with his attaché-case and its valuable
content.
Wharton is tied up at the
office and ask Travers to go down to Kenray's shop, which is run by
his stepsister, Grace Allbeck, under false pretenses and
surreptitiously pried information in a pub from their employee, Tom
Fulcher. And he has a talk with Sir William's secretary, Miss Doris
Chaddon.
Travers learned from
these conversations that the knowledge of Sir William lugging a small
fortune in jewellery had been widely broadcast. This made him feel
"vastly different about the curious disappearance," but
then Wharton called to tell him that the case had become a murder
investigation: Sir William's body had been discovered in the back of
a railway truck with the back of his head caved in. Curiously, the
body was partly covered in sugar.
As a brief aside, the
pathologist discovered that Sir William had "an abnormally thin
skull." So thin that they would like to have the skull as "a
medical curio" in a bottle of spirit, but how can someone with
with an abnormally thin, eggshell-like skull have made it to
sixty-four without ever bumping his head? I remember reading about a
real-life case from my country, known as Het
Pantoffel-Eierschedelarrest (The Carpet Slipper-Eggshellskull
Arrest), in which a man threw his carpet slipper at his wife – who
was hit in the head and died several hours later. I thought this was
the only aspect of the story that was a little too convenient, for
the plot, to be the case.
Travers and Wharton have
to find a murderer in an interesting cast of characters. There are
the aforementioned suspects, who were already present when Sir
William was still missing, but they also have to consider one of "the
last of the eccentrics" from
late Edwardian times, Betram Dale, who's collects rings and once
offered the lower story of his house as a police post – providing
him round-the-clock police protection for his collection without
spending a dime on an expensive security system. But when Travers
visited the antique shop to speak with Allbeck, he saw Dale "shaking
his fist at someone in the shop." And as Wharton wisely
remarks, collectors are "the biggest thieves and liars unhung."
Roger Mavin is a failed
novelist and Sir William hired him as a live-in secretary to help him
work on his autobiography, which contains an important clue to the
solution. Travers even goes out of his way to point out this clue and
assures the reader that the passages from the manuscript wasn't an "unnecessary digression or mere padding." Always nice when
a mystery writer goes out of his away to assure his readers that the
story is fairly clued. Lastly, there's Marion Blaketon, who runs a
Prisoners' Reformation Society, but Wharton knows she uses the
Society for more nefarious activities.
I should also mention a
part of their (early) investigation consists of the reconstructing
Sir William's last train journey, which was somewhat reminiscent of
Freeman
Wills Crofts.
The solution to the
murder of Sir William plays on the old-sins-cast-long-shadows theme
linked together by a series of (world) events, such as a
long-forgotten episode in France and World War II, which would not
resulted in the deaths of three people had one of those events not
happened – or gone differently. A tricky juggling-act convincingly
pulled off by a true plot-technician. Although this approach made it
a little difficult to anticipate the full explanation. And I missed
the merciless demolition of an intricate, rock-solid alibi or two.
Nonetheless, The Case
of the Corporal's Leave, as a whole, nicely fitted together and,
while not one of Bush's top-tier detective novels (e.g. The
Case of the Missing Minutes, 1936), it's a fine specimen of
the jigsaw-puzzle detective story from the genre's Golden Age with a
tragic back-story. The answer to the “murder” Travers committed
elevated it above the average Golden Age mystery novel, but not quite
enough to break through the ceiling of the top-floor.
I'll probably be
returning to Bush (again) before too long, because I only just
noticed how Carrian
the plot-description of The Case of the Hanging Rope (1936)
is.
No comments:
Post a Comment