The Case Of The Murdered Major
A review of the Case of the Murdered Major by Christopher Bush – 221221
Wow, this is a completely different Ludovic Travers story. It is as though Christopher Bush has pushed the factory reset button and decided to reconfigure his amateur sleuth, Ludovic Travers, afresh. Gone is the urbane man about town, a man whose finely tuned grey cells and well-honed deductive powers solve many a knotty murder mystery to the exasperation of Scotland Yard’s very own “General”, George Wharton. Travers is a much more subdued figure, trapped in an unusual set of circumstances where he is almost powerless to solve a crime and reliant upon the good offices of the “General” to put an intriguing mystery to bed.
There’s a war on, don’t you know? The Case of the Murdered Major, the first of a trilogy and originally published in 1941, now reissued by Dean Street Press, sees series sleuth Anthony Travers set on his twenty-third adventure having enlisted into the army. He is posted as adjutant with the rank of Captain to No 54 Prisoner of War camp in Stoneleigh under the command of the bumptious and irascible Major Stirrop. Stirrop has the uncanny talent to rub his underlings up the wrong way primarily by insisting he is always right.
The first detachment of Germans prisoners arrives, one of whom is a British agent. There is a conundrum when on one of the frequent counts of prisoners, it is discovered that there is an extra one but when the count is repeated, the additional prisoner just as mysteriously has disappeared. Resentment of Stirrop’s rather laid back but authoritarian approach seethes in the background and it is no surprise when his body is found in the snow. There are no footprints in the snow but two large depressions, one where the body was found and the other nearby, suggesting, perhaps, that the body was moved. His hat has some traces of sand on it and some way from his body. His skull has been fractured.
Naturally, movement into and out of the camp is strictly controlled and the assumption is that someone inside must have murdered the Major. It is a mystery that is a sort of impossible crime where the culprit, while possibly a German agent, is likely to have been under Stirrop’s command. But who? And why were his secretary and Stirrop’s love rival seen lurking outside the camp at the time of the murder and did the British agent, Lading, really leave the camp in the car? What, if anything, has the extra prisoner who appears and disappears have to do with it all?
Fortunately, of all the officers that the police could throw at the problem, George Wharton comes to the rescue and takes charge of the investigation in his usual inimitable style. It helps that he has a working relationship with Travers but the latter’s role is reduced to more of a bit part, making sure things happen as he takes temporary charge of the camp. For experienced readers of Golden Age detective fiction, the culprit is relatively easy to spot but the method used to kill the Major is one of Bush’s more ingenious.
As well as toning down the role of Travers in this story, Bush also takes the (hitherto) unusual step of having the story narrated, albeit in the third person, by an all-knowing anonymous person. Reading the book is rather like sitting in front of a roaring fire and listening to a lengthy but ultimately thrilling yarn. In writing the book Bush clearly draws from his own experience in running a POW camp and while there is some purely military procedure which might have chimed with his contemporary readers, he builds up a picture of tedium and pettiness. In some ways the murder brings the place alive, and the arrival of Wharton brings not only more of a civilian perspective to the second half of the book but also an increase in pace. The denouement reads like a wartime thriller.
Once I had got over the shock of Bush’s about turn on the characterisation of Travers, I settled down to enjoy a well-written, well-plotted mystery. I look forward to reading the second part of the trilogy to see how the newly promoted Major Travers fares.
