Casual Slaughters (1935) by James Quince

"James Quince" was the pseudonym of James Reginald Spittal, a British clergyman, who wrote three detective novels during the 1930s, The Tin Tree (1930), Notice to Quit (1932) and Casual Slaughters (1935), but all three have been out-of-print for nearly a century – secondhand copies became expensively scarce over the decades. So the only glimpses we got of Quince's detective fiction were the equally rare reviews from the doyens of the fandom (here and here). That was how things stood until Black Heath reissued The Tin Tree and Casual Slaughters as ebooks back in February. 

The Tin Tree is essentially a war novel that tells the story of a 1914 murder in one of those quintessential, English villages against the background of those long, drawn out years of the Great War. So the story offers contrasting snap shots of the Belgian front and the English countryside untouched by war. And while Quince was obviously more of a storyteller than plotter, I remained intrigued by his third and final detective novel. A mystery with an intriguing-sounding premise and some of the early reviews seemed to hint at a tighter plot. Well, I was not wholly disappointed!

Just like The Tin Tree is partially a Great War novel, Casual Slaughters can be classified as a story of English village life. And how the peaceful community of Bishop's Pecheford responds to the discovery of a murder. 

Casual Slaughters opens with the members of the Parochial Church Council meeting to discuss the condition of the churchyard, "a wilderness of nettles varied by cheap marble monuments," which under new legislation has come under the responsibility of the council – whose members don't mind minding their own graves "but won't pay for other people's." They eventual settle on keeping new graves level and begin removing old mounds where there were no relatives to object. So, the next morning, the Sexton begins to remove the mound on the grave of Sarah Mant's ("single old lady, she were, not related to none of us"), but the first shovel full of dirt reveals a man's hand. When all the earth is removed, they're shocked to find an earth-grimed, decomposed body without a head ("a little late for artificial respiration, I'm afraid")! A gruesome discovery that turns Bishop's Pecheford into a buzzing beehive.

The police has a presence in the story and there's even a representative of Scotland Yard, but Detective-Inspector Lawless is almost apologetic about his presence. Lawless says new regulations made England "a paradise for criminals who have the sense not to talk" as he's not even allowed to ask "who are you?" and half the time all they can do is "to sit round with our hands out hoping for clues to fall into them." So the detective work defers almost from the beginning to the villagers and in particular to two persons, the Vicar and Blundell, who's "an axed Lieutenant-Commander who lives precariously upon Rhode Island Reds" and narrator.

Early on in the story, they have to intervene when the villagers decided Mrs. Hemyock might have been responsible for the body in the churchyard. She only came to the village a few years ago and said she was a widow, but the villagers hypothesis she might have had a husband who unexpectedly turned up again ("...gives him a drop of weedkiller in his tea and buries him"). So they have to divert their attention to saver possibility to wildly speculate about, which unexpectedly turned up a possible lead to the identity of the body. But there's also the yearly Flower Show. An annual event Quince described as "one glorious afternoon and evening," in a humdrum year, when everyone in Bishop's Pecheford gives themselves up "to sheer enjoyment of a crashing band and hot tents" not to mention "the spectacle of naked hatred" – given free "by those exhibitors who have not won a prize." Such an incident leads to an accusation of murder, but much more interesting how they appropriated the Palmist Tent when their clairvoyant canceled her appearance. So they staged a memory game to pump the villagers without arousing suspicion and feeding the rumor mill.

When a second, much fresher corpse is discovered on Sarah Mant's grave, the case comes officially to an end and Lawless has to bow out. And that's when the Parochial Church Council takes the investigation into their own hands (Chapter XII: "The P.C.C. as Sleuth"). Quince interestingly contrasted with how the villagers reacted to the possibility of the murderer being a so-called outsider in the first-half with the possibility of the murderer being one of them in the second-half. All of sudden, they don't want to meddle in the private affairs of their neighbors. But this honest depiction of human nature never sours the story as the storytelling remains lively and lighthearted. Casual Slaughters is, stylistically, a kindred spirit of Ronald Knox's The Three Taps (1927), Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) and Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936). Where Casual Slaughters differs (a lot) is the quality of the overall plot.

As already said, Quince was a storyteller with a good eye for character and setting, but either lacked the skill or simply was not interested in putting together a somewhat fair play plot. Not that the plot lacked the material to do so. The link between the corpses in the cemetery is clever and how the second murder came about was as unexpected as it was original, but you have no change in figuring it out for yourself and that's a shame. A stronger plot would have turned this already lively and buzzing village mystery into a classic of its kind. Now it's a novel of village life with a light detective plot. Not that Casual Slaughters is a chore to read, but, if you value plot, you end up wishing it was a little more than it ended up being. 

Note for the curious: Notice to Quit appears to be most elusive of Quince's trio of detective novels and has, as of this writing, not been reprinted by Black Heath, but I did come across a 1932 review of the book. The review revealed how Quince wrote his detective stories as all three novels begin with a question of identity. The Tin Tree begins with Gunner Arthur Rachelson admitting he's really the fugitive John Montauban. Casual Slaughters has a badly decomposed, headless body buried in a churchyard. Notice to Quit has a father and son trading identities. Was this playing around with identities, like the bumbling Scotland Yard detective, a lingering inheritance of the Doylean era?