The Tin Tree (1930) by James Quince

James Reginald Spittal was a British clergyman, born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, who was a London vicar and wrote three obscure, nearly forgotten detective novels in the 1930s – published under the pseudonym "James Quince." A writer who has been a permanent residence on my wishlist ever since Martin Edwards and Curt Evans reviewed The Tin Tree (1930) and Casual Slaughters (1934) in 2014. The Tin Tree was particularly high on the list as it intriguingly combined a quasi-historical setting with a typical, English village mystery and enough material about the Great War that "one almost could classify the book as a war novel."

But as usually is the case, James Quince has been out-of-print for close to a century and copies have become as scarce as they are expensive. That is until last February when Black Heath reissued The Tin Tree and Casual Slaughters as cheap ebooks. So on the pile it went. 

The Tin Tree stands out among the early, 1930s Golden Age mysteries as a (sort of) nostalgic throwback to the Victorian-era potboiler, but agree with Curt that the story is told with "an easy charm and emotional restraint" in comparison to those turn-of-the-century sensational novels with a tricky and gruesome murder that needs to be solved – culminating with a double-twisted, triple-decker solution. A murder mystery played out against the backdrop of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the battlefield of the Great War, which gave the story an atmosphere, or mood, all of its own. Since there are very few detective novels and short stories from this period that used the First World War as a backdrop. Enough talk. It's time for some action!

A so-called tin tree is a "bizarre fake tree observation posts" built "using steel and wrought iron" to spy on the enemy "after switching them under cover of darkness with real battle-scarred stumps left in no-man's land." The Tin Tree opens with Lieutenant Roger "Secco" Budockshed and Gunner Arthur Rachelson manning one of these twisty, leafless metallic trees when they get shelled and Rachelson screams, "O God! Again!" Lieutenant Budockshed has always been intrigued by the mysterious Gunner Rachelson. What made him refuse promotion and "why should he be so oyster-like a companion?" So he asks him what made him scream out and repeat those words. Gunner Rachelson decides to tell him the whole story.

Gunner Arthur Rachelson reveals that his real name is John Montauban. A name dominating the headlines in 1914 and captured the attention of the entire nation, which "was as yet but mildly interested in Serajevo." At the time, John Montauban pulled double duty as estate manager and babysitting his younger, troublesome cousin, Sir Juan Montauban. John is unable to babysit his cousin round the clock and is enraged when he learns he not only impregnated a seventeen-year-old housemaid, but closed the matter behind his back by giving the family a cheque for £300. Angrily, John goes to Pecheford House to confront his cousin. Sir Juan only real interest was in the combustion engines and was working in the yard/garage. Ever since he was a child, John entered the yard by climbing up the wall to the roof, slide down a bit on the other side and dropped himself. A fifteen feet drop! And that what he did on that day. When he looked over the wall, John spotted his cousin's legs sticking out from underneath a car directly below and dropped himself. Just as he made the drop, wearing "heavy nailed boots," Sir Juan poked his head out and got his skull squashed like a ripe grape.

John immediately understands the difficulty he would face in trying to explain it was an ill-timed accident. There were more than enough witnesses who saw him in "a white-hot rage" and possesses a platinum motive as he stood "to gain the baronetcy, the entailed estates, and, say, £80,000" – which is unconditionally his in the event of Juan's death. So he engineered his own disappearance and got a lucky break when a practically naked, badly decomposed body was fished out of a river and everyone agreed the "messy corpse" was that of the wanted John Montauban. Operation Mincemeat thirty years before its time! He nearly got away to begin an entirely new life in the United States had it not been for the murder in Serajevo to complicate his "sham murder." This story is told to Lieutenant Budockshed with the Great War playing out in the background with "a crackle of machine guns" and "the greatest artillery duel of the war" ("chronicled elsewhere"). 

Lieutenant Budockshed is eventually wounded and moved to a London hospital where he decides to delve deeper into the 1914 murder case, which turns the sham murder into a quasi-impossible crime. The body was still very warm when John had picked himself up and Juan must have pushed himself out from beneath the car, but, if John is innocent, who could possibly have had the time to kill him? And get away unseen from an empty garage yard? However, this is the point in the story where it begins to resemble a Victorian-era potboiler with the introduction of the villain of the second-act, Señora Zumarraga. Mrs. Antonia de Zumarrage is a well-known medium from Barcelona, Spain, who holds expensive private séances and avoids other spiritualists. She turns out, like everyone else in the story, to have a connection to the old murder case ("funny that we always seem to come up against Spaniards in this affair"). Señora Zumarraga involvement gives the second-act a touch of the turn-of-the-century thriller, but Quince skillfully used it to setup the first of two false-solutions with a marvelous play on that trite, 1800s artifice of the deathbed confession. The third and final act deals with the three solutions, two false-solutions and climaxing with the correct one.

The solutions demonstrate the author had an imaginative mind and was likely influenced by G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown (c.f. "The Hammer of God," 1910), which shows a particular richness in the unusual motivation behind the second and third solutions. But they are not exactly models of fair play. The Tin Tree stands on its storytelling and wartime backdrop. Not rigorous plotting. So plot purists beware unless you have a special interest in detective set during the World Wars.

Nonetheless, The Tin Tree is an admirable, even impressive debut and, as has been pointed out elsewhere, you can chalk most of the story's shortcomings up to an inexperienced novelist. I suspect another problem (or maybe a blessing) is that the novel is a little older than its publication date suggests and there's a clue suggesting the story might gone through a couple of different versions and rewrites. When Budockshed goes over the case, he wonders what happened to the murderer before and after John landed on his cousin. Had the murderer time enough to escape through the yard door and shut it without being seen or had the murderer hidden somewhere. Dismissing the possibility that the murderer (ROT13) jnf haqre gur pne, orpnhfr “ab tebja-hc crefba penjyf haqre n pne jvgubhg furre arprffvgl.” This foreshadows the second false-solution and suggests it may have been intended as the right one with the third solution being a final addition to the plot. I could be entirely wrong, but it would explain the uneven, patchiness between the engrossing opening-act, a sagging middle-part and the ending with its triple-solutions. Either way, I thoroughly enjoyed The Tin Tree as a rare, World War I mystery novel in spite of its flaws. But I'll try to pick something more traditional for the next review.