"And keep your eye on that fisherman. Don't let him do any thing funny."- Conan Edogawa (Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed a.k.a. Detective Conan, vol. 45)
Nearly
two years ago, I read Harriet Rutland's splendid (and splashy)
Bleeding
Hooks (1940), which had been reprinted at the time by Dean
Street Press and their new edition is introduced by our resident
genre-historian and scholar, Curt
Evans, who listed additional titles in his preface of detective
novels with a fly fishing background – including John
Haslette Vahey's Death by the Gaff (1932).
Secondhand
copies of the Vahey title tend to be on the scarce side, but recently
came across an inexpensive reprint edition in the catalog of Black
Heath Edition and remembered Evans had mentioned it in his
introduction to Bleeding Hooks. So I immediately reeled in a
copy of the book.
This
new edition of Death by the Gaff has been reissued under
Vahey's most well-known pseudonym, "Vernon Loder," which is a
name you might recognize from the recent Detective Club reprint of
The
Mystery at Stowe (1928). A pleasantly written, old-fashioned
detective story about African blowpipes and poison-smeared thorns,
but the plot was hardly innovative. Fortunately, the same can't be
said about his fly fishing-themed mystery novel, which definitely had
a touch of originality, inventiveness and some of the splendor of the 1930s, Golden Age detective story.
Death
by the Gaff takes place in Cwyll, North Wales, where the Horn
Hotel caters to ardent anglers, professional and amateur alike, but
recently a particular unpleasant specimen of the fisherman had taken
up residence at the hotel, Solomon Hayes – an "elderly Don
Juan of an offensive sort." Hayes acted as "a perfect
pig." A man who treated his fellow anglers as poachers and came
close to trading blows with a local fisherman, Peter Hoad, who had
accidentally taken one of his nets and was "practically
stigmatised as a thief." Hayes also made two enemies at the
hotel, Edward Bow and Robert Chance.
The
latter of those two actually had a tussle with Hayes when tried to
dissuade Chance from fishing in the same pool as he was trying his
luck in, which is a discussion that ended with "a not too heavy
uppercut." Hayes immediately consulted a lawyer and visited the
local police station to press charges against Chance.
So
pretty much everyone had enough of Hayes and a round-robin petition
was signed, which demanded his removal from the hotel. On top of
that, Caroline Hayes turns up one evening in response to an anonymous
letter she received suggesting that her husband had been fooling
around with a local girl. However, by the time she arrived, Hayes had
gone missing. And he would not be found until the following day.
Hayes'
body is spotted in the water of a natural pool, trapped beneath a
jutting rock, just above the lip of a waterfall, but when the body is
retrieved from the pool they find "a
round, raw wound" in the left side of the throat –
suggesting a blow from a steel gaff-hook. A gaff is a big steel hook
on a stick and is used to land a salmon. Coincidentally, there was a
lost gaff at the time Hayes went missing and the search for this
potential murder weapon is what drives a large portion of the
investigation, which is done by both a police inspector and two
self-appointed amateur snoops.
 |
| Map of Cwyll |
Inspector
Parfitt is the policeman in charge of the official end of the
investigation, but a good portion of the relevant detective work is
done by two friends, Harry Wint and Joan Powis, who find traces of
blood on one of the wooden sleepers (railway tie) in one of the train
tunnels – which are used as a short cuts by the local fishermen and
employed by Hayes, and his girl, as a secret rendezvous spot.
I found that rather odd, because you would think the hillsides of
Wales has better places to offer than a dark, soot-covered train
tunnel for the purpose of clandestine, night-time meetings. But hey,
that's just me.
Interestingly,
Wint and Powis come to regret their involvement and even attempt to
walk back on the evidence they uncovered, which they do on account of
the person who got arrested and committed for trial at the assizes.
Wint and Powis concoct a theory that would explain Hayes' death as an
unfortunate accident. Surprisingly, their theory seemed to hold water
when a diver found a gaff at the bottom of a pool.
On
a historical side-note, the scenes with the old-time, hard-hat diver,
complete with a bell-helmet and surface air-pump, were fascinating to
read and not a "character" often encountered in vintage detective
stories. I'm only aware of two detective stories in which a hard-hat
diver plays a role or makes an appearance: Max Murray's The
Neat Little Corpse (1950-51) and Joseph
Commings' 1953 short story "Bones for Davy Jones" (collected
in The Locked Room Reader, 1968). So I thought that was
interesting.
Nevertheless,
Inspector Parfitt, who's "a methodical and conscientious man,"
gets to redeem himself and carries out a careful, time consuming
experiment behind that scenes that involves a zinc bathtub in his
attic and gallons of water from the river Cwyll – an experiment that got results which "filled
his mind with triumph." This patient, time-consuming, but
scientific, approach to the problem and the various experiments (one
of them involving a wax dummy) makes this book closely related to the
work of R.
Austin Freeman, Freeman
Wills Crofts and even John
Rhode. Only problem is that Vahey decided to take the humdrum
route once the finish-line of the story came in sight.
 |
| A vintage 1930s gaff |
Death
by the Gaff is full of local color and beautiful descriptions of
the Welsh countryside, rivers, whirlpools and waterfalls with a
pleasant concoction of professional police work and amateur
detection, but the revelation of the truth felt like a dud. As if all
the energy had gone out of the plot. The murderer's identity is
logical enough (a bit obvious perhaps) and the motive of this person
was signaled early on in the story, but the solution simply felt underwhelming and somewhat uninspired.
Even
the murderer almost completely deflated when the inevitable knock on
the door came and only made a halfhearted attempt at committing
suicide, which was easily deflected by the inspector. After that, the
murderer merely expressed his wish to be hanged as soon as possible.
Once again, the solution makes sense and is competent enough, but the
ending lacked the energy that was present in the preceding chapters
of, what was until then, a very good sporting mystery. So this is really a story in need of a better ending and burdened with an anticlimactic ending. However, I'm probably selling the book short here by nitpicking the ending, because, on a whole, this was a really good read. It's just that the ending was not as impressive as the rest of the story. I really wish my enthusiasm had sustained itself into the final chapter and would not have to end this review with a splash of cold water, but that's what I got out of the story.
So there you have it. Another hacky review I botched with my nitpickery. Oh, well, I'll try to do better with the next one.
Finally,
I mentioned in the opening of this blog-post a short list of
mysteries with a fly fishing background and three of those titles are
currently residing on my TBR-pile, which are Cyril Hare's Death
is No Sportsman (1938) Josephine
Tey's The Singing Sands (1951) and Ngiao
Marsh's Scales of Justice (1955). A fourth title, Double
Cross Purposes (1937) by Ronald A. Knox, is available as an
ebook. That leaves only Nigel Orde-Powlett's The Cast of Death
(1932) as one of those pesky, hard-to-get and out-of-print titles,
but I can easily the knock the others of my list and I'm kind of
tempted to do so. But we'll see. So stay tuned!
