Dead On Time
A review of Dead on Time by Clifford Witting
Clifford Witting is another one of those Golden Age detective fiction writers whom popular tastes, rather unfairly, have despatched into obscurity. He writes with some flair, not a little wit, usually making the reader smile on every page with either a finely tuned sardonic turn of phrase or a sharp observation and can produce a fascinating impossible murder that keeps his reader intrigued. Dead on Time perfectly showcases his skills.
Originally published in 1948 and the eighth in his Inspector Charlton series, not all of which have been reissued, sadly, the scene of the crime is an English pub, the Blue Boar, where the local police are gathered to celebrate the retirement of Sergeant Martin. Their reverie is interrupted when the local drunk and ne’er-do-well, Jimmy Hooker, bursts into room clearly desperate to pass on some information but then has second thoughts. Moments later, when he has returned to the public bar at closing time which was ten o’clock in those days, Hooker is collapses, poisoned with cyanide. Charlton’s job is to find out who the culprit is and how the poison was slipped into Hooker’s tankard.
Hooker’s favourite tipple was mild and bitter – ah, the good old days – which he drank out of a tankard and which he had topped up (frequently) when he got half way down. While he was out of the bar, one of the topers, Winslake, was seen pouring a gin into Hooker’s tankard. As the obvious suspect and having caused a disturbance subsequently in the pub, he was arrested, especially as he was seen to have been in an animated conversation with Hooker to whom he owed some money. To the police’s profound embarrassment, though, he too is poisoned, some poison slipped into his porridge supplied by an outside caterer, apparently at the request of his mother, poison while in his police cell.
Witting supplies a plan of the pub, which is worth studying in order to keep track of the movements and check the alibis of the suspects as they move around the rambling collection of rooms. Amongst those who are interviewed are a married couple who have had previous with Charlton and a marvellous heel and brimstone evangelist in the form of Zephaniah Plumstead. It gradually dawns on Charlton that the key to solving the two murders lies in the information that Hooker was going to impart to the police.
Around the half-way mark, the book, which was ambling amiably along as a hybrid of an impossible murder and police procedural, takes a sudden and unanticipated turn, plunging the reader into the murky world of criminal gangs and jewellery heists. We learn that a priceless collection of Indian jewels is landing at the nearby port of Southmouth to be transported to London and that there is a plot to hijack the convoy. Motivation for the murders established, the focus of the book becomes more of an inverted mystery.
The story reaches a thrilling finale with a police operation, working in cahoots with the Army, to thwart the hijack and arrest the minions, before Charlton reveals who committed the murders and, more intriguingly, how. The way Hooker was murdered seems deceptively simple, but often the simplest ways are the best. The culprit, too, will surprise many a reader, although seasoned hands of the genre might have got there by a process of elimination.
The join in the plot line is a bit too clunky to make this a classic, but it is is thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining. Perhaps specialist reissue publishers will help the growing band of Witting aficionados complete the set.
