The Longest Pleasure (1981) by Douglas Clark

Last year, I tumbled across the work of Douglas Clark, a British mystery writer, who wrote, what appeared to be, typical post-World War II police procedural novels, but with classically-styled plots crammed with medical puzzles, ingenious poisoning methods and the occasional impossible crime – closely aligning himself with R. Austin Freeman and John Rhode. So you can argue that Clark was the last true Golden Age mystery writer to arrive on the scene.

An anonymous commentator left a handful of insightful comments on my review of the excellent Death After Evensong (1969) and recommended two specific titles, Premedicated Murder (1975) and The Longest Pleasure (1981).

I had already been looking at such promising-sounding novels as Sweet Poison (1970), The Gimmel Flask (1977), The Libertines (1978) and The Monday Theory (1983), but The Longest Pleasure had an unusual and intriguing premise. Curt Evans praised it in his 2016 review as "a smartly designed and original police procedural." So, for once, I decided to listens to my peers instead of diving head first for one of the impossible crime novels in the series and moved The Longest Pleasure to the top of the pile.

The Longest Pleasure could easily have been one of the oddest detective stories I've come across in a long time had it not been for my recent reading of Edward D. Hoch's "The Cactus Killer," collected in Hoch's Ladies (2020), which found a weirdly compelling way to combine a medical and scientific mystery with the serial killer story – poured into the mold of a modern crime novel/police procedural. The focal point of the plot is a string of manufactured outbreaks of botulism that either made people gravely ill or killed them!

The first outbreak occurred on Exmoor where Mr. and Mrs. Burnham with their two children, aged eight and ten, were taking a camping holiday and ate a tin of ham with their tea. On the following day, two students on a walking tour found the family lying around the campsite and their serious condition is aggravated on account that "no medical help had been given until thirty-six hours after the suspected ham had been eaten." And two of them pass away. A second and third outbreak rapidly follow each other and they can all be traced back to strip-cans of beef and luncheon meat. All three of the infected tins came from the same chain of stores, Redcoke Stores.

Detective Chief Superintendent George Masters and DCI Bill Green, of Scotland Yard, have been handed the investigation, but they hardly know where to begin as this particular has a dazzling array of possibilities and avenues to explore – without giving them a proper foothold to get started. One of the first hurdles they have to take is a quasi-locked room mystery and deals with how the culprit was able to send "dollops of botulism bugs" into a can of meat "without puncturing the skin." Botulism spores are "totally anaerobic" and can't tolerate any oxygen, which is why they a can of food from which all air has been dispelled before "they can thrive and produce their exotoxins." There's also the questions how the culprit had been able a pure and rare type of botulism, why this person has been targeting Redcoke Stores and how many more contaminated strip-cans are still on the shelves or residing in "the larders of unsuspecting housewives."

Masters wants to alert the public and warn them against the Redcoke strip-cans, but the higher-up refuse to comply and believe such "a warning would cause a panic" and "a consequent breakdown of medical services," because everyone who has recently eaten from a Redcoke strip-can (potentially millions) would immediately start filling sick. And their demands to be tested would swamp the laboratories. On top of that, Masters doesn't want to help the culprit with vilifying and destroying Redcock Stores ("a national asset"). So they have to work hard and fast to get to the bottom of the case before more people fall ill or die.

The Longest Pleasure has all the ingredients of a modern thriller with dangerous bacterium or killer virus on the loose, but Clark's treatment can almost be described as cold and clinical with research being the primary method used to tackle the problem – which covers a large swath of this relatively short novel. I suppose some would call The Longest Pleasure a fictionalized textbook with Clark acting more as a lecturer than an author. However, the subject matter and how it was cultivated to act as pure and dangerous poison is fascinating enough to keep reading. An approach that betrayed how incredibly close Clark's detective fiction is linked to such scientific mystery writers as R. Austin Freeman, Arthur Porges and the Radfords.

Around the halfway mark, Masters decides to sprint towards a resolution with "a long shot" that reduced the number of suspects from tens of millions to a small and select group of people. A long shot that would have been a decidedly unfair shortcut had the reader not been prepared for it early on in the story.

But, however you look at it, The Long Pleasure is an anomaly that can not be compared to anything that qualifies as a traditional detective story. A detective story in which the victim's are names in newspaper articles or police reports and the murderer does not appear until the end, which also reveals a motive that would actually been more at home between the pages of a serial killer thriller. Instead, the lion's share of the attention goes to a primitive micro-organism and what makes that little rod-shaped bacteria tick. You can safely say that the botulism bacteria is best fleshed out character in the story.

So I don't know whether, or not, to like The Long Pleasure. The book has a fascinating premise and an oddly compelling, if a little dry, approach to the multifaceted problem, but, on a whole, it was not even half as satisfying as Death After Evensong or Plain Sailing (1987) – two genuine neo-classical detective novels. This is why the next stop in the series is going to be The Libertines. A novel promising two poisonings of which one is mathematically and the other physically impossible.