The Case Of The Climbing Rat
A review of The Case of the Climbing Rat by Christopher Bush
Originally published in 1940 but written a year earlier, this, the 22nd in Bush’s Ludovic Travers series, now reissued by Dean Street Press, is the second novel on the trot that is set in a France that was to change dramatically during the Second World War. Once again Travers is sucked into an intriguing case, courtesy of his new wife, Bernice, or rather a rogue uncle of hers, Gustave Rionne.
Rionne was a surgeon but was struggling to make ends meet, having been suspected of performing an abortion and botching a plastic surgery procedure. He had begun writing letters to Bernice, asking for money, his overtures becoming more insistent and threatening. Having told Travers of her concerns, as all new husbands will do he decides to go to France to “have a word” with the recalcitrant uncle.
As is often the way in a Bush novel there are two or more seemingly unconnected strands at the start which become increasingly intertwined as the story progresses. The second strand involves a notorious French serial killer, Armand Bariche, who was supposed to have died in a fire, after a successful spree of fleecing wealthy women and then killing them. Inspector Gallois, whom we have met in a couple of previous Travers’ escapades, has had a tip off that Bariche is alive and well and in the south of France. Gallois travels there in the hope of meeting the informant and get the information he needs to capture Bariche, an arrest that would be a considerable feather in his chapeau.
Travers was due to meet up with Gallois in Paris, but, surprise, surprise, the two bump into each other in the south of France as they go about their disparate business. Matters take a darker turn when Uncle Gustave is murdered, ingloriously stabbed to death in a public toilet while in the act of urinating. On the way to meet the informer, Gallois’ assistant, Charles Rabaud, is involved in a mysterious car crash and is taken in by a kindly doctor and his sister. Then a Swiss national, Georges Letoque, is found murdered, shot dead in a villa he had rented.
Then there is a travelling circus whose star attraction is a troupe of acrobats and a rat, who is trained to clamber up a rope to join his keeper. Only on one occasion he steadfastly refuses to play ball, a novel twist on the detective fiction trope of a dog that either does or does not bark.
Out of these disparate strands Bush eventually makes a coherent story, although it only begins to make sense at the end when the scales begin to fall from Gallois’ and then Travers’ eyes. Of the characters in Bush’s complex plot not everyone is as they seem, but the reader would be hard pressed to identify the culprit and the motivation.
The story also allows Travers to meditate on the black and white nature of capital punishment. Is someone who rids the world of a brutal and callous serial killer deserving of the same ultimate fate as would have been meted out to the serial killer had he been caught? That is one of the many problems of capital punishment, of course, a matter that in some countries, at least, could only be resolved well after the end of the Second World War which was to engulf Europe.
For the armchair sleuth this is a frustrating tale, but it is enjoyable enough as a piece of entertainment and just shows that while you can choose your friends, you cannot choose your family.
