Martin Fone's Blog, page 48

Cadenhead’s Old Raj Dry Gin

William Cadenhead Limited, founded in 1842, are Scotland’s oldest independent bottler and produce a wide range of spirits including whisky, rum, and gin from their operations in Campbeltown. Since 1972 they have produced gins under the Old Raj brand and there are currently three types available with two of them available at differing strengths.

Old Raj unashamedly and, perhaps, politically insensitively harks back to the era when India formed an important part of the British Empire and a gin and tonic, as well as a refreshing way to wind down from a hard day at the imperial coalface, was a way of gaining some protection via the quinine in the tonic against malaria. As Churchill once said, “the gin and tonic has saved more Englishmen’s lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the Empire”.

What is immediately eye-catching about the Old Raj Gin is its pale yellow colour. This is due to the addition of saffron once the distillation process has been completed. Due to the expense of real saffron it is added sparingly, said to done so personally by the company’s chairman, but also to ensure that its taste does not overwhelm the spirit. As befits the old school image of the brand the other botanicals are fairly conventional; juniper, coriander, Seville orange peel, liquorice, angelica root, orris, cinnamon, cassia quills, and nutmeg.

The botanicals are each macerated in a mix of alcohol and water for 36 hours before being distilled separately in a small pot still and then combined with a neutral grain spirit. It is at this point that the saffron is added. On the nose the juniper stands out as do the citric elements. In the glass the spirit takes on a muted faintly yellow colour upon the addition of a quality tonic.

The juniper is the dominant flavour but there is enough orange coming through to give the spirit a complexity and balance that would otherwise be lacking. The saffron is not immediately obvious, its sweet and earthy flavourings blending in with and complimenting the other background botanicals. Those expecting a powerful hit of saffron will be disappointed – perhaps the Chairman was not too generous with this batch – but its presence adds a different twist to a London Dry style. It comes in two strengths, 46% ABV and 55%. Naturally, I went for the 55% version!

The bottle has a distinctly old fashioned look about it, made of clear glass with a rectangular shape and rounded edges leading up to steep rounded shoulders, a short neck and a silver screwcap. The 55% version comes with blue labelling while the weaker version uses red. The labelling is minimalist, at least in terms of information, but has three distinctive if somewhat un-p.c images. On  the front is an old buffer in full viceroy uniform and to the left-hand side is a hunting scene, the sahib astride an elephant with a tiger at bay and the legend “time for an Old Raj Gin served straight” and on the right a few members of the Raj relaxing, a native attendant carrying a tray of drinks and the legend “Old Raj Gin and Indian Tonic served after the hunt”.    

At least there is no compromising the brand’s old school image and the use of saffron does give an interesting gin even more of a curiosity value.

Until the next time, cheers!

The Voice Of The Corpse

A review of The Voice Of The Corpse by Max Murray – 240606

The Voice of the Corpse, originally published in 1948 and reissued by Galileo Publishers, is the first of eleven murder mysteries written by the Australian-born writer, Max Murray, each of which has Corpse in the title. This is the second of his books that I have read, The King and the Corpse being the other, and it is memorable for its opening image and an extremely funny first chapter. However, rather as L P Hartley demonstrated, having a stunning beginning is no guarantee that the rest of the book will be remembered.

There are plenty of positives, though. Angela Pewsey is sitting by the window singing while working at her spinning wheel making wool from the hair of a chow, described as the smelliest dog in the neighbourhood, when she is killed by a blow to the back of the head. It is a wonderfully bizarre murder, worthy of Ngaio Marsh at her best, and perhaps outré deaths is an Antipodean trait. By common consent of the residents of the village of Inching Round, and, even grudgingly, by the Yard detective, Inspector Fowler, the murderer has done a public service and there is a remarkable reluctance to bring the culprit to justice.

Angela Pewsey is one of those stock characters in detective fiction, the writer of poison letters, whose life work is to collect tittle tattle about her neighbours and holding them in her power by threatening to expose their guilty secrets. Inevitably, there are several villagers who have received missives form her and have motive enough, if pressed, to want to do away with her. Among the credible suspects are Graham Ward, who has an on and off engagement with Celia Sim, Major Torrens, a bluff military man who is not all that he seems, and an overworked doctor, Dr Daw, who is on the edge of a breakdown and is in love with a woman married to an alcoholic and abusive farmer.

There are a wonderful array of characters and Murray writes with no little humour and verve, but the book rather stalls after the set-up and the introduction of the major characters, with too much time spent on the local police’s belief that it was a tramp that did it, even Fowler quickly dismisses that theory, and the amateur detective, Firth Prentice, playing hard to get over whether to indulge Mrs Sim, Celia’s mother, and investigate the crime. Mrs Sim is a study of a larger than life village personality who, unlike the murder victim, employs her omniscience for the good of the community.

It is another book where the inquisitiveness of small boys leads to discoveries that have eluded their seniors. Not only have they a vantage point from a tree, but they are experts at identifying people by the sound of their walk, demonstrating their ability to the discomfort of Inspector Fowler. While honing their poaching skills, they come across a bloodied handkerchief and the murder weapon hidden in the garden of a suspect. This is enough to convict and hang the culprit.

In a surprising twist, though, Firth is convinced that although the condemned person had murdered, his victim was not Angela Pewsey. He, Mrs Sim and one other take justice into their own hands and the book ends with the reader feeling that a form of justice, albeit rough, has been done and as well as his man Firth catches a bride.

Murray’s tone leaves little room for the reader to sympathise with the fate of Angela Pewsey, choosing to emphasise the terrible dilemmas her actions have created. She got what she deserved and with her removal, most, but not all, of the villagers to live their lives in peace. It is not fairly clued and there is little in the way of deductive detection, but it is not that kind of book. It is a bit of a roller coaster, a novel that does not take itself too seriously, and great fun.

All credit to Galileo Publishers for bringing his work back to the attention of Golden Age detective fiction fans.

Sir Horace Jones

One man who can fairly claim to have put his stamp on the City of London and yet who is barely remembered is Sir Horace Jones. During his tenure as City Surveyor, a post he held from 1864 until his death in 1888, he was responsible for designing three of the capital’s most distinctive markets.

The first was Smithfield Market, a huge and distinctive building with its colourful ironwork, which took seventeen years to complete over three phases. Completed in 1883, only now is it being replaced, the City’s last remaining wholesale market moving to a £1 billion high-tech site in Dagenham this year (2024). Jones was also responsible for building Billingsgate Market, the world’s largest fish market, which was opened in 1878. The building eventually proved to be impractical for the demands of modern day fish merchants and the market relocated to the Isle of Dogs in 1982. It is now used to host corporate events. The third was Leadenhall Market, completed in 1881, showing Jones’ love of ornate ironwork, and now offering a canopy for the watering holes frequented by insurance underwriters and brokers.       

Jones even found time in 1880 to design the Temple Bar Memorial with its striking rampant griffin or dragon, which stands in the middle of the road where Fleet Street takes over from the Strand, marking the original spot where Wren’s Temple Bar stood and the point where the City of Westminster becomes the City of London. His likeness can be found on one of the brass plates adorning the monument.

However, his most iconic contribution to London’s skyscape was a solution to London’s perennial problem, traffic congestion. With London’s continuing expansion ever eastwards and London Bridge being the furthest downriver bridge, there was an ever increasing demand for another bridge to link the City with the Surrey side of the Thames. The problem was where to place it and how it was to operate in a way that allowed Customs House and its surrounding wharfs to operate as before without the risk of disrupting the flow of goods and foodstuffs.

Many designs were submitted for a new bridge, some bizarre, some practical. Jones’ design was essentially a drawbridge using a see-saw principle rather than a chain-lift to raise and lower its enormous bascules, which were powered by hydraulic chambers filled by water pumps, driven by steam. Externally, it was decorated with Gothic looking towers, which echoed its proximity to the more sober Tower of London.

Jones’ design was selected in 1884, the Tower Bridge Act was passed by Parliament on August 14, 1885 and he and his technical partner, John Wolfe Barry, were appointed to superintend construction, which began on April 22, 1886. Rather like Charles Pearson, though, Jones was never to see his project to completion, dying on May 21, 1887. However, Barry saw the project through to its completion and the bridge was finally opened by the Prince and Princess of Wales on June 30, 1894.

The bascules, now powered by electricity,  open around 800 times a year, adding in their own unique way, to the traffic chaos of the area. However, a testament to how much the river traffic has declined is the statistic that in its first year of operation the bascules were lifted 6,194 times or about seventeen times a day. Although Tower Bridge did not solve London’s traffic problems, it is a building that is quintessentially London.  

A Knife For Harry Dodd

A review of A Knife for Harry Dodd by George Bellairs – 240604

If you like a story with a high body count, then the eighteenth or possibly twenty-first in George Bellairs’ Inspector Thomas Littlejohn is likely to satisfy you. There are three murders, a fire, a death from natural causes after a chase by a bull, and a murder aboard a vessel and loss at sea following a maritime collision and while the culprit seems to be revealed somewhat inadvertently midway through the book, there are enough potential suspects and red herrings to keep the reader on their toes. It is also quite a funny book with some interesting characters and so there is much in this book, originally published in 1953, to enjoy.

The principal murder victim is the eponymous Harry Dodd who rings home after leaving the pub, asking to be picked up as he is feeling unwell. By the time Dorothy Nicholls and her mother get to him, it is clear that he has been fatally stabbed but they get him home, put him to bed and do not call the police until the middle of the night. Why did they delay and who stabbed Harry and why?

As Dodd’s brother is a Member of Parliament, Scotland Yard in the form of Littlejohn and his faithful sidekick, Cromwell, are quickly called in to investigate and discover that Dodd’s domestic arrangements a tad unusual. An ill-considered affair with his secretary, Dorothy Nicholls, leads to his family insisting that his wife divorces him, somewhat against her will. Dodd is now living with Dorothy and her mother, although he sleeps in the attic and has little enjoyment save for his regular visit to The Bear public house. Amongst the items in his pocket is a bottle top from Hoods’, a beer that is not served at the Bear and which proves to be an important clue in solving the mystery.

There are some wonderful characters, not least Ishmael Lott, a hen-pecked corn merchant who is led a miserable life by his wife but finds solace in studying stocks and shares, creating graphs of the rise and falls of certain stock picks on the walls of the shop’s cellars. There is more to this eccentricity than meets the eye and it allows Lott to become a central point in the mystery, both explaining certain aspects of Harry Dodd’s behaviour and, through his nautical incompetence, becoming Harry’s avenging angel. It is heartwarming, too, that he is able to escape from his own personal hell.

The other important link in the story is The Aching Man, a pub run by siblings, Peg and Sid Boone, which both Harry and his son, Peter, are known to have visited. There is a parrot there which as is their wont is liberal with information and a child whose existence provides the motivation for the murder. Knowing too much is fatal for Harry’s father, cruelly incarcerated in a lunatic asylum for heckling his politician son, and for the family solicitor, Pharoah, and alibis which at first glance seem rock solid that fall apart, especially if provided by an alcoholic doctor.

Littlejohn, while an empathetic character who could be accused of handling Harry’s former wife with too kid gloves, is more of an investigator who takes a methodical approach to the problem at hand. There are no flashes of inspiration or deductive leaps: he goes where the clues and the needs of the investigation take him, often serving little more than a convenient plotting device to keep the story moving. The fireworks are to be found in the glorious array of characters that Bellairs serves up for our enjoyment.

While it is hardly a classic, there are enough moments in the story to make it worth reading.

The Key To Longevity

Here’s food for thought for men wishing to extend their lifespan; say farewell to your crown jewels.  

A study published in Current Biology in 2012 into the lifespan of eighty-one Korean eunuchs born between 1556 and 1861 found that their lifespan was between 14.1 and 19.1 years longer than the lifespan of non-castrated males of similar socioeconomic status. A similar study conducted in Italy in 2014 found that the lifespan of castrated males was on average 13.5 years longer. Similar results were found amongst American men who were institutionalized in mental asylums and castrated.

The precise reason why this should be the case is unclear, other than the suspicion that male sex hormones decrease longevity, the presence of testosterone being linked to an increase risk of cardiovascular disease and prostate cancer.

It would take a lot of balls to take such a drastic step to increase one’s lifespan and as I rapidly approach my allotted three score and ten, I feel that I have rather missed the boat.

Makes you think, though!

Someone From The Past

A review of Someone from the Past by Margot Bennett – 240601

It is rather a neat touch to use a passage from a poem by Cecil Day Lewis, no mean hand as a detective fiction writer himself under his nom de plume of Nicholas Blake, to provide the key to the resolution of a murder mystery. This is what Margot Bennet has done in her final piece of crime fiction, Someone from the Past, originally published in 1958 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series.

It is a story of two women and a series of disastrous decisions. The narrator, Nancy Graham, is the plain Jane while her best friend, Sarah Lampson, is the glamorous one who while outwardly confident and vivacious is rather brittle. She has had a number of lovers, Peter Abbott, a man with a violent streak who has served time for robbery with violence, a self-obsessed actor, Mike Fenby, whom she married but then left, Laurence, a literate man with little money, and Donald, whom Sarah had left to die after he dramatically shot himself when their affair ended. So tight is their circle that Nancy seems to take up Sarah’s discarded lovers and it is her affair with Donald that is the source of the difficulties in which Nancy finds herself.

Sarah tells Nancy that she has received a missive that indicates that she is going to be murdered and that the culprit will be one of her lovers. The language in the letter is odd and is vaguely familiar to Nancy but she cannot remember why. Had she recollected that it was a piece from Day Lewis it would have saved a lot of bother. Instead, the following Donald, in great distress, bangs on Nancy’s door and tells her that Nancy has been killed in her flat while he was staying there, unconscious from the effects of strong tablets in another room.   

Nancy’s principal characteristics are blind loyalty and an ability to make the wrong decision. Her first thoughts are to protect Donald and rush to Sarah’s flat to eradicate any trace of Donald’s presence. In doing so, she implicates herself and as she is an unconvincing liar and rather reckless, her further actions, including trying to dispose of a gun and then flee the country with Donald, only make matters worse for her. It is also clear that someone seems to be framing her, typing the letter on her typewriter and concealing the murder weapon in her flat after a police search. The police, led by Detective Inspector Crewe, are naturally deeply suspicious of her and Nancy’s only hope of salvation is to use her inside knowledge to solve the murder.

It is a cleverly constructed book. Even though there are only four suspects, if we accept the letter verbatim and Nancy’s implicit innocence, Bennett keeps the suspense going until the end when there is a dramatic finale which almost ends badly for Nancy until the arrival of a fortuitous deus ex machina. Through Nancy’s recollections of her times with Sarah and what she has been told and her conversations with Sarah’s former lovers, the reader builds up a picture of each of the characters and their possible motivations for wanting to kill her.

Once Nancy is capable of rational thought, the identity of the murderer becomes clear. Nancy is a flawed and exasperating character but one who is clearly human and with whom the reader can identify. Even when she makes a life-changing decision at the end, with her past track record the reader cannot help fearing the worst.

An interesting variation of the closed murder theme, it is easy to see why this was highly regarded when it was published, winning the Crossed Red Herring Award for 1958. Margot Bennett never wrote another crime novel, preferring to go out at the top.

Twelve Keys Gin

And now for something completely different. In 1599 on of the most important and influential alchemical works was published, The Twelve Keys, attributed to Basil Valentine but probably by Johann Thölde. The text falls into two parts, the second containing twelve short chapters, each of which gives an allegorical description of a step in the process to create the Philosopher’s Stone. The text was deliberately obscure, intended to be accessible only by those who were well versed in the mysteries of alchemy.

Matthew and Alex Clifford have used this alchemical lodestone as the hook upon which to base the concept of their Twelve Keys Gin, launched in 2018. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the gin uses twelve botanicals, each carefully selected not only for their somewhat out there flavour profiles but also because they reflect one of four periods of the history of distillation; The Cult of Bacchus, Persia, said to be the home of alchemy and advanced distillation, the medicinal scriptures of the Benedictine monks, and the ritualistic uses of juniper by Cathar priests.

If after all of this you are expecting a weird and wonderful botanical profile, you will not be disappointed. Along with the traditional foursome of juniper, cinnamon, orris, and angelica we have frankincense, caraway seeds, gentian root, honey from Matthew’s own farm, basil, apricots, quince, and figs. Using a mixture of distilling techniques, vapour infusing some botanicals and pot distilling others and finishing off with the honey, Clifford has produced a crystal clear spirit with an ABV of 46%.

Despite the unusual array of botanicals, this is very much a spirit in the London Dry Gin tradition with a firm base of piney juniper. Nevertheless, there is a strong and warming backdrop of honey and the sweeter notes are provided by the apricot, quince, and figs. It was a complex and subtle drink, one which meets Clifford’s aim of producing a harmonious combination of flavour and style.

If the selection of the botanicals and the calibration of the mix shows careful and intelligent planning, the bottle itself also provides proof that this is a quality product. It is stunningly elegant, using cylindrical clear glass for the body, leading up to rounded shoulders, a medium-sized neck and a wooden stopper with artificial cork. The lip of the bottle is of the now ever so trendy fat variety. The labelling makes impressive use of copper lettering on a deep blue background and the key image on the front is of an alchemical design. It looks great.

Whether Clifford created his philosopher’s stone is a moot point. While the gin was launched in 2018 and is available from all the usual stockists – I got mine from my recent trip to Drinkfinder UK – the distillery website is no longer available, making me wonder whether it is still in production. The guys at Drinkfinder were telling me that gin sales had dropped by over 40%. Perhaps what the ginaissance giveth, it also taketh away and the gin boom is truly over.

Until the next time, cheers!

Curiosity Killed The Cat

A review of Curiosity Killed the Cat by Joan Cockin – 240530

Joan Cockin was the nom de plume of Edith Macintosh and Curiosity Killed The Cat, originally published in 1949 and reissued by Galileo Publishers, was the first of three murder mysteries that she wrote. It deals with the consequences of the Second World War both in terms of the requisitioning of a country pile and the resolution of some unfinished business.

Evacuation was a traumatic experience both for those torn from their natural environment and for those who are forced to accept the newcomers. From this time perspective we tend to think of evacuation in terms of children moved from city environments – my mother was moved from Bury in Lancashire to Paignton and, curiously, was bombed out in both locations – to be placed often with unwilling and unsuitable substitute parents. But evacuation also meant the wholesale movement of government departments such as the Ministry of Scientific which took over Wassel House in the village of Little Biggling. There is an undercurrent of resentment running through the book, the locals and the evacuees both longing for the restoration of normality and for the usurpers to return to London.

What is holding up the return of the Ministry to London is its continuing work on developing a new product, Britex, which could be even more successful than nylon and is a closely guarded secret. There is consternation in the higher echelons when it is discovered that there has been a security leak and that some details of the new product have been leaked to some South American scientific journals. However, before we reach that point we have an almost impossible murder to solve, that of a disliked and unlikeable messenger at Wassel House, Parry, who likes to give the impression that he has the ear and protection of the Director General and who has no compunction about reading and rifling through papers on desks. He is found murdered in his billet by his landlady, the unworldly and rather innocent Miss Penny who has been traumatized by the reminiscences brought back by Parry’s frequent drunken and abusive behaviour.

The local inspector, Cam, is allocated the case and with some amateur assistance from his good friend, Dr MacDermot, seeks to solve the case. The early assumption is that the culprit is a member of the Ministry staff and there are only really three suspects, Ratcliffe whose writing is found on a slip of paper hidden in a chess piece giving the name of a South American contact, Dr Robarts, whose chess set it is and who regularly played a game with Parry, and Stone, a surly individual who was injured in the war and held by the Germans for five years.

Robarts and Stone, together with a colleague, Chatsworth, had been studying in Germany before the war. Chatsworth was subsequently convicted and executed for espionage, Parry having a part to play in his detection, or so he claimed. Was Parry’s murder some form of retribution for Chatworth’s death and who played the part of the assassin and was he also the source of the further leaks? Macpherson finally convinces the doubtful Cam that there was a second key to Parry’s room and once that is established he is on the path to solving the murder.

There is more than a little humour running through the story with the romantic dalliance between Miss Penny and Mr Witherspoon who is particularly concerned about his vegetable patch, the staff’s attitude to the pompous and bluff Director General, Sir Arnold Conway, whom Cam has the audacity to name as one of his potential suspects given his rather close association with the victim, and the attitude of Martins, the house’s porter, whose insistence on sticking to protocol imperils the safety of one of the Ministry’s key staff.

The book finishes with the good guys also receiving their just desserts, adding a bit of warmth to a story that was enthralling and entertaining. I am looking forward to reading Cockin’s other murder mysteries, one of which, Villainy at Vespers, Galileo Publishers have already reissued with the third, Deadly Earnest, scheduled for release in August this year.

Charles Pearson

The phenomenal growth of London in the 19th century brought with it many problems, not least the ever present issue of traffic congestion. Charles Pearson, solicitor to the City of London, was one man who exercised his mind on the problem, issuing a pamphlet in 1845 entitled “Trains in Drains”, proposing a railway running underground from King’s Cross to Holborn, powered by air pressure.

It was such an ambitious and unusual proposal, stretching the technology of the time to its very limits, that it met with predictable opposition and scorn. The Times called it “an insult to common sense” while a Dr Cumming declared: “Why not build an overhead Railway?…It’s better to wait for the Devil than to make roads down into Hell”. For Sir Joseph Caxton, the problem was the concept of going underground. “People, I find”, he observed, “will never much go above the ground, and they will never go underground; they always like to keep as much as possible in the ordinary course in which they have been going”.

Undaunted, in 1846 Pearson presented a plan to Parliament for a line running longitudinally from King’s Cross to Blackfriars Bridge with a central hub at Farringdon which would replace all the other termini for trains entering and leaving London. A version of his proposal appeared in the edition of May 23, 1846, the Illustrated London News, showing two underground tunnels feeding a huge terminus at Farringdon with space to serve up to four railway companies and with goods stations just outside the main passenger station. The trains would be powered by air pressure.

Parliament rejected Pearson’s proposals, but by 1852 he had raised enough money to form the City Terminus Company to bring his dreams to fruition. Around the same time the Metropolitan Railway Company was formed with plans to connect Paddington to King’s Cross. Both companies presented their bills to Parliament, Pearson’s proposals once more rejected but the Metropolitan line given the go ahead. Pearson did get legislative approval in 1854 for a shorter line which ran to St Paul’s cathedral rather than Blackfriars Bridge.

Financial difficulties beset the Metropolitan Railway Company’s progress, forcing them to abandon any plans to go any further south than Farringdon. Still beset by financial difficulties they found a knight in shining armour from an unexpected quarter, Charles Pearson, who raised enough money to allow the Metropolitan Line to be completed and opened to the public on January 10, 1863. Pearson, though, never saw his dream of an underground railway in action, dying of dropsy in 1862.

The concept of an underground system took off with other lines built but the intrinsic problem of traffic congestion was never solved. In 1895 the enterprising The Picture Magazine published a puzzle entitled The Labyrinth of London which invited the reader “to enter by the Waterloo Road, and his object is to reach St Paul’s Church without passing any of the barriers which are placed across those Streets supposed to be under Repair”. Time or a reissue, methinks.

They Can’t Hang Me

A review of They Can’t Hang Me by James Ronald – 240527

One of the finds for me in 2024, thanks to a wonderful series of reissues from Moonstone Press, is James Ronald and They Can’t Hang Me, the main course of the fourth collection of his works, originally published in 1938, is the best yet. The premise is that a former newspaper magnate, Lucius Marplay, believes that he was cheated out of his newspaper, the London Evening Echo, by four of his subordinates. Having suffered a nervous breakdown and been held in an asylum for twenty years on the grounds of suffering from homicidal delusions, Lucius has sworn to kill each of the four former employees, reasoning that if the authorities believe him to be insane they would not be able to hang him if he committed murder.

By the third chapter Lucius has managed to escape from the asylum in an masterly and ingenious way and makes his way to Fleet Street, pawning his psychiatrist’s overcoat for funds and to buy a rubber cosh, to wreak his reign of terror. Three of the gang of four are murdered, two of which are carried out despite a heavy police presence in an impossible murder style, and each are presaged by a death notice that appears in the mock ups for the next edition of the Echo. How has Marplay been able to pull off the murders and to insert the notices in the paper without anyone seeing him, except for a glimpse before the first murder, and despite the constant surveillance of the police, led by Superintendent Wrenn, or is there another explanation?

One of the book’s strengths is Ronald’s ability to create and describe convincingly the atmosphere within the newspaper office as the gang of four become increasingly more alarmed about their safety. Each respond to the crisis in their own different way, each believing that they will become the victims of an almost supernatural power, something that neither bricks nor the best efforts of the Yard can stop from wreaking its vengeance. It is powerful stuff.

There are some wonderful characters including Marplay’s daughter, Joan, and her maiden aunt guardian, the formidable Agatha Trimm. At the start of the book Joan learns about her father’s fate and is determined to find him and salvage his reputation. To do so she embarks upon a desperate course that almost leads to her downfall and is helped by the paper’s gossip columnist, the suave Lord Noel Stretton, an opportunity for Ronald to introduce a bit of romantic interest.

However, the stand-out characters are Flinders, once the star of Fleet Street and now an alcoholic wreck who is eventually killed because of what he knows, and an investigator with a dodgy Scottish accent, Alastair MacNab, who burst on to the scene and is rather more than he lets on to be. These are vibrant character creations and allow Ronald to lighten the tone of the book while keeping the plot moving at pace.

The story is not fairly clued, important pieces of information just being dropped into the narrative not least the tontine nature of the agreement between the four owners of the Echo, but this is much more of a psychological thriller than a conventional murder mystery. The attitude of one of the gang of four to their impending doom suggested to me that there was more going on than met the eye and so the major twist at the end was not so unexpected but nevertheless made for a dramatic ending.

It is fair to say that Superintendent Wrenn made a hash of the case, being too trusting of what he was told, missing signs of Marplay’s initial whereabouts which Joan easily picked up, and suffering the indignity of having two people murdered right in front of his eyes. No wonder he considered his position. However, there was no master sleuth to highlight the police’s inadequacies, events rolling on to their natural conclusion until Wrenn twigged what was really behind the murders.

Structurally, the book exhibits a nice piece of ring composition, something I am always a sucker for, opening and ending with two old buffers sitting in deck chairs discussing the affairs of Lucius Marplay. This is a great book, not without its imperfections, but written with such great vim and brio that you are carried along with it all and are desperate to see how it all ends.

As an added bonus, the Moonstone Press reissue includes three of Ronald’s short stories. I am already looking forward to volume five.