At the Sign of the Clove and Hoof (1937) by Zoë Johnson

Zoë Johnson was a British author of only two detective novels, At the Sign of the Clove and Hoof (1937) and Mourning After (1939), but then she stopped writing and disappeared into obscurity as her "books fell out of print and were forgotten" – until a few years ago. John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, reviewed the book in 2021, "made me grin in admiration," ending with a wish to see it reprinted. Moonstone Press got the hint and reissued Johnson's long-forgotten mystery novel just two years later.

John Norris warned in his review "Johnson has dared to flout the tacit and written rules of detective fiction" with "a solution that defies all those conventions." In principle, I've no problem with breaking the rules or upturning conventions, but it comes with a big but. I'm with Anthony Boucher that the rules of the detective story can be broken, twisted and subverted, but, to do it successfully, it requires a mystery writer who understands and respects them in the first place. Zoë Johnson seems to have been a knowledgeable mystery fan first and author second as she pokes fun at everything from Conan Doyle, Edgar Wallace and the British village mysteries of the 1930s to the fictitious detective in all their guises. So a very amusing and imaginative rule breaker, but a tricky one to discuss. Let's give it a shot.

Larcombe is a small fishing village, "off the beaten track," standing at the head of a lonely promontory and pretty much isolated by a valley, moor, cliffs and devious, ill-kept country lanes. The Clove and Hoof is the local pub where the villages and fishermen come to drink, share stories and gossip. The arrival of a big, red-faced man in Larcombe opens the door to rampant speculation, "there'd never been such a hubbub over one topic since 1918," because the Stranger is rumored to be a detective from London – a detective who seemed to have a special interest in the unlikable vicar. So everyone expected to wake up one morning to the news Rev. Ernest Pratt had been hauled away in chains, but not that he had been found shot at the bottom of a cliff. And the Stranger is nowhere to be found. Inspector Percy Blutton is tasked with finding the vicar's murderer among the strange, colorful and eccentric villagers and fishermen who frequent the The Clove and Hoof.

There were footprints and marks at the crime scene indicating the vicar had struggled with two, possibly three men and one of them must have had a wooden leg. And there's only one man in Larcombe with a wooden leg, Captain John-Thomas Ridd. A true character, "like an illustrated joke in Punch," who has "a wooden leg, a black patch over his left eye and his dress was cut in an out-moded, sea-faring mould." Ridd is very popular with the locals and the odd summer visitor entertaining them at the Clove and Hoof with tall tales of "Sea Serpents, pirates, treasure-trove, sharks, smugglers, octopuses and duels with cutlasses." Ridd is not the only local oddity. Lionel Gedling is an old eccentric curmudgeon and nervous recluse who lives in a big, rundown house with his servant, Costigan. Old Sebastian Hannabus runs a small antique shop and jack-of-all-trades from trapping rabbits and taxidermy to repairing clocks and relieving the British healthcare system ("...he'd pull out a bad tooth for sixpence"). Dick Bowle is the aging, bedridden tobacconist who wears a bowler hat even in bed to cover his bald head. Bert Yeo is the mountainous, immovable owner of the Clove and Hoof, but a sudden change has come over him ever since the Stranger arrived and mysteriously disappeared.

Finally, there's the best and most memorable character, Christian Peascod. An artist, poet, lover and self-appointed amateur detective who has studied "the works of Bailey, Doyle, Van Dine, Roger East, Freeman, Wills and Croft, and the Misses Sayers and Christie" – combined with a training in Speculative Philosophy at Oxford. Just like John noted in his review, Peascod dominates whenever he appears and a shame he's likely a one-and-done deal. A list of potential suspects and witnesses comprising of characters escaped from the pages of Lewis Carroll or J.M. Berry story is not the only complication for Inspector Blutton. A poison pen writer is sending out threatening letters in blue water color like they are birthday party invitations ("the real Penny Dreadful touch, what?"), while simultaneously someone is pulling a string of bizarre pranks with dead fish, air guns and a metronome. When a severed head is dragged from a pool, the Chief Constable calls in Scotland Yard. That brings in the third detective, Detective-Sergeant Plumper. A very promising, up-and-coming officer who's "somewhat unorthodox in manner and method." So quite the opposite of the much more plodding Blutton.

So, conventionally-sounding enough, but, after this point, At the Sign of the Clove and Hoof starts to live a life of its own away from the beaten track. And impossible to discuss the plot any further. But there are one, or two, things that deserve to be highlighted.

Firstly, I enjoy the case-for-three-detectives structure and always find it a pleasure to come across one, especially from this period of time. The best examples are Ronald A. Knox's The Three Taps (1927), Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936) and the fairly recently translated La maison interdite (The Forbidden House, 1932) by Michel Herbert & Eugène Wyl. All take a satirical approach, one way or another, to lampoon the detective story, the detective character or both, but it gives room to something criminally underused to this day. Namely rival detectives. A good, well-drawn rival detective can liven up a detective story more than padding out the murderer's bodycount. So having three detectives is a party, but these case-for-three-detectives novels also tend to be excellent detective stories in their own right making them so much more than just parodies. Now the solution is where Johnson differs a little from Bruce and Knox, but more on that in a minute. Secondly, while the second-half of the novel is better read than discussed, it should be noted it's littered with great and memorable scenes. Such as the siege of Old Barton "throughout the ghostly hours of early morning" or the press descending on the village with their screaming headlines ("Hell Let Loose in Quaint Village," "Work of Secret Society?" "Who Next?") and sensational write-ups ("this quaint picture-village has become a ghastly charnel-house"). Just fun from start to finish. What about the ending, you ask?

In the hands of a less talented writer, At the Sign of the Clove and Hoof would have fallen flat on its face at the end. Something that should have been deadly dull as it brazenly thumbs its nose at the rules and conventions of the day, but Johnson got away with it based on nothing more than barefaced cheek, a ton of charm and being relentlessly entertaining throughout. Johnson intended to have some fun and she even got a plot purist, like myself, to go along with it. No mean feat! So I'll keep my fingers crossed Moonstone Press gets an opportunity to reprint Mourning After next.

A note for the curious: I was wondering where Zoë Johnson fits on the family tree of mystery writers. It's tempting to pigeonhole her with the British satirists like Bruce or Edmund Crispin, but, based solely on this novel, Johnson had a radically different approach to the traditional detective story. So maybe Johnson was something of an isolated phenomenon like the incomparable Gladys Mitchell, but then it struck me. At the Sign of the Clove and Hoof reads like one of E.R. Punshon's own unorthodox detective novels, e.g. Diabolic Candelabra (1942) and The Conqueror Inn (1943). Just an afterthought. Anyway, I'll probably pick something light and short to close out the year.