The Case Of The Missing Minutes
A review of The Case of the Missing Minutes by Christopher Bush
There is a distinct change of mood in this, the sixteenth in Bush’s Ludovic Travers series, originally published in 1937 and now reissued by Dean Street Press. It has rather dark undertones, tackling a difficult issue which is as relevant today as it was at the time Bush wrote the book, and paints a more human picture of the amateur sleuth who, hitherto, had been a bit of a cold fish. Whilst it has all the elements of a classic murder mystery, Bush is more interested in the motivation behind the crime than the whodunit.
The murder victim is Quentin Trowte, an old man who lives in a big house with a child, his young ward, Jeanne. At the behest of his sister, Helen, Travers looks into the mysterious goings on at the Trowte household. Her former maid and her husband are now employed there but have to leave the premises before eight o’clock in the evening. On occasions during the evening and night, they hear shrieks. Travers is about to confront Trowte but when he gets there at eight minutes to eight, the door is ajar and he finds the master of the house slumped on the floor, having been stabbed in the back.
The likely suspects all have cast-iron alibis for the time of the murder, and it looks as though it is going to be one of those stories where much time and effort is spent in examining and dissecting the movements of all involved. At one level it is, the clue being in the book’s title, although Bush is not above playing a trick on the reader by introducing another favourite trope of alibi-based mysteries, the sound of music being heard coming from the window of one of the suspects at the key moment. The resolution of the mystery of the missing minutes is not revealed until the end and is almost a throwaway, its importance overtaken by the horror of the situation.
Child neglect and abuse are grim subjects, and it emerges that Trowte has been subjecting Jeanne to a reign of terror. Travers and Helen are touched by the girl’s plight and arrange for her to be taken to a safe haven. Travers discovers that the rooms have been bugged, that the electrics have been arranged so that lights in the child’s bedroom can be turned on and off remotely to heighten her sense of terror, and that he has a viewing gallery to watch her every movement. He even went to the trouble of buying a snake and a rodent. It is little wonder that the child was emotionally scarred and was prone to shrieking during the night.
As the truth is revealed and the girl’s backstory emerges, Travers is less and less concerned to get to the bottom of who killed Trowte, believing, as the reader does, that the evil man deserved what he got. Despite the best efforts of “The General”, Wharton of the Yard, who appears towards the end of the story, to see that the letter of the law is adhered to and Trowte’s killer dances the hemp jig, Travers is never going to let this happen. By the letter of the law, Travers may have obstructed the course of justice, but in this instance natural justice is a more noble thing.
I was surprised by this book. Bush had always struck me as a writer who operated within the constraints of the genre of murder mystery, producing complex, well-clued mysteries that both baffle and entertain the reader. What is missing in this book in terms of complexity of plot is more than made up for the humanity and warmth of feeling that pervades the narrative. For all his foibles, Travers has a heart, and he behaves in this case as we would all wish to, given the circumstances. There is no better endorsement.
