The Case of the Extra Grave (1961) by Christopher Bush

Earlier this year, Curt Evans broke the devastating news that his friend, "the publisher Rupert Heath of Dean Street Press," died unexpectedly of heart failure on March 6, 2023, aged only 54 – which is no age to die. Rupert Heath's untimely passing also spelled the end for Dean Street Press. It's perhaps cliché to say that the shortest lived stars shine the brightest, but it certainly applies to Heath and DSP as their contribution to the current reprint renaissance can't be overstated.

This renaissance age of reprints began over twenty years ago as the internet provided a new market place to smaller, independent publishers and came to fruition in 2010s. A breakout moment came in 2014 when the British Library reprint of J. Jefferson Farjeon's Mystery in White (1937) unexpectedly became a "runaway bestseller." After that, it appeared as if the floodgates were truly opened and the newly founded Dean Street Press had a huge part to play in pushing the reprint trend into a full-blown renaissance. Heath took an industrial approach to bringing obscure or long out-of-print authors back by republishing 5-10 novels at a time. So it took less than a decade to accumulate a catalog of over 500 novels that include the (partially) complete works of writers like Brian Flynn, Robin Forsythe, Ianthe Jerrold, Harriet Rutland and E.R. Punshon. The name that for me will always be synonymous with Dean Street Press is Christopher Bush.

Between 2017 and 2022, Dean Street Press reissued all of Bush's sixty-three Ludovic Travers novels. A series, taken as a whole, possessing the same variation and balance, quantity-quality wise, as the entirety of the DSP catalog as Bush was capable of adjusting with the times – unwittingly creating a microcosm of the changes the genre underwent from the 1930 to the late '60s. Curt Evans wrote in his introduction to the last baker's dozen of reprints that Bush "managed rather better than the Queen of Crime to keep up with all the unsettling goings-on around him, while never forswearing the Golden Age article of faith that the primary purpose of a crime writer is pleasingly to puzzle his/her readers." So the series began as elaborate, lavishly-plotted 1930s detective novels crammed with unbreakable alibis, paired corpses and the occasional impossible crime. During the war, Bush switched the narrative style from third-person to first-person and began trimming the baroque from the plots. This also started Travers transformation from an amateur sleuth to the head of the Broad Street Detective Agency.

Travers completed his transformation into a private investigator in the early 1950s when the series had shed all of its baroque to become genteel private eye novels with sleek, classy plots. Now complications, like murder, arose from ordinary crimes and routine cases like blackmail, theft and missing persons or valuables. The Case of the Russian Cross (1957) is an excellent example from that period, but sometimes you got a novel like The Case of the Three Lost Letters (1954) that hearkened back to those earlier novels. The subject of today's review tried to combine some of the old and new in its first and second halves.

The Case of the Extra Grave (1961) is Bush's 55th Ludovic Travers novel and my first foray into the 1960s period of the series. A regular client of the Broad Street Detective Agency, John Hill of the United Assurance Agency, asks Travers to investigate a problem with a personal link. Hill's great-uncle used to run a modest, specialized jewelry store, "principally in the antique side of the jewellery trade," which was taken over by his nephew, Julian Matching – who lived under the "dominating influence" of his elderly mother. When his mother died, Julian cut loose from his old life and got married to "the last woman his mother would have picked." Julian met Mary Hyson at Frascoli's Restaurant where she performed as the vocalist for the dance band under her stage name, Moira Delane. The old, stuffy family home, "a Victorian monstrosity," was modernized and refurbished, but there home life was a happy one. This culminated with Moira doping a glass of port one night, packing all her belongings and disappearing with several pieces of antique jewelry valued at several thousand pounds.

So the problem appears to be fairly straightforward, "try to discover the whereabouts of Mrs. Matching and recover the jewellery," but Travers receives information and begins to uncover clues suggesting something else all together. Moira's car is found abandoned near a train station with all of her baggage crammed into the boot and empty, recently filled-in grave is found in the garden. Julian believes the grave was meant for him. And the doped drink was intended to kill him. However, Moira had mastered "the art of fluent lying" and had been involved with that great unknown of the detective story, "X." A lover-confederate who could have nicely stashed her away somewhere, until everything quieted down. And could that lover-confederate be the rising pop singer, Rocky Carlisle?

That plot-thread gave the story a scene that now stands out as it was obviously intended as a sign of the times, but, more than sixty years later, it's quaint and homely. Chapter 9 ("Low-Brow Half-Hour") has the Travers sitting at home in front of the fire and reading about Rocky Carlisle in the Radio Times. So they turn on the television set to watch the pop sensation perform on the B.B.C. to a shrieking audience. I realize this is an incredible minor scene, perhaps not even worthy of highlighting, but it drove home (very simply) how much has changed culturally, technologically and personally since such faraway novels like The Perfect Murder Case (1929) and The Case of the Green Felt Hat (1939). Anyway, back to the story.

The first half of The Case of the Empty Grave is concerned with Travers trying to figure out what, exactly, happened to Moira and when, and what, to tell the police in a worst case scenario. I can't even hint at the developments in the second-half, but Bush played on one of his own homespun devices often employed in his 1930s novels (SPOILER/ROT13: gur cnverq pbecfrf zheqrerq jvguva n fubeg crevbq bs rnpu bgure va qvssrerag ybpngvbaf, ohg guvf gvzr, gb nqq n zbqrea gbhpu, vg gbbx n juvyr sbe gur qrpbzcbfvat obqvrf gb or sbhaq). Not nearly as a complicated as in those earlier novels nor used to craft one of those cast-iron alibi, but really liked the false-solution spun out of these developments and discoveries. Sordidly suitable to the times and overall plot. By comparison, the correct solution feels like Bush took the long way round and Travers forcefully ignored a not unrealistic possibility to arrive at a somewhat obvious conclusion. Most of my initial suspicions were on point, but Bush did a credible enough job in drawing attention away and allowing the unfolding story to sneakily fill in the details. Admittedly, the correct solution effectively threw some of the earlier scenes in a different light.

So, on a whole, The Case of the Extra Grave can be summed up as a briskly paced, well-written novel from Bush's twilight years genuinely attempting to do something clever with the plot, but not always with same shinning brilliance as thirty years previously. However, I think you can only truly appreciate Bush's 1950s and '60s mysteries, if you have followed how Travers evolved over the decades. Curt Evans noted in his introduction not all of Bush's colleagues fared as well as he did when it came to staying abreast of the times, "John Dickson Carr, an incurable romantic, prudently beat a retreat from the present into the pleasanter pages of the past" and Agatha Christie's "strivings to understand what was going on around her collapsed into the utter incoherence of Passenger to Frankfurt and Postern of Fate." That makes the series somewhat of a rarity as not every Golden Age detective aged and changed along with the years quite like Travers, which is rare enough, but to do it simultaneously with the style of storytelling and plotting that do not feel out-of-touch is no mean feat. One of the many, many reasons why Christopher Bush is my favorite name to have come out of Dean Street Press. Recommended with the caveat that new readers should begin at a much earlier point in the series.

On a final, semi-related note: the next time I return to this series, I want to tackle The Plumley Inheritance (1926) and The Case of the Prodigal Daughter (1968) either back-to-back or do a twofer review. A first and last detective novels in long-running series tend to be marred by inexperience or wear-and-tear, but The Plumley Inheritance ("this is the England of village cricket, vicars and country gardens") and The Case of the Prodigal Daughter (drugs, pop music and discotheques) sound like a fascinatingly historical bookend to one of the most fascinating series the Golden Age has produced.