The Case Of The Second Chance
A review of The Case of the Second Chance by Christopher Bush – 230907
The Case of the Second Chance, originally published in 1946 and reissued by Dean Street Press, is the thirty-first in Bush’s long-running series involving his amateur sleuth, Ludovic Travers, but, incredibly, just about marks the midway point. Inevitably, with such a prolific writer there will be occasions when the book just fails to meet their usual standard. Sadly, this seems to be one of them.
There are some redeeming features, though. It marks a further development in the relationship between Travers and his partner-in-solving-crime, George Wharton of the Yard. Wharton is on the cusp of retirement and the two are exploring the possibility of setting up their own detective agency, one that would give the grubby business of collecting evidence for divorce cases a swerve, and Travers, to test the lie of the land, has established links with Bill Ellice, who has an agency to sell.
Wharton and Travers are like chalk and cheese and, while they often despair of each other’s methods and propensity to go off at tangents, have a good rapport and working relationship. Wharton tends to be patronising towards the amateur, while Travers takes a good deal of delight in demonstrating that more often than not Wharton has got the wrong end of the stick. They work well and their relationship is often one of the strong points of a book by Bush.
That said, there is rarely a sense that any book is part of a series, something which makes it easier for a newcomer to engage in the book, but for the seasoned reader means that there is too much going over old ground and the move to a first party narrative means that a lot of time is spent reconstructing what Wharton might have thought and what lines he might be following. In other words, there is quite a lot of padding which can detract from both the pace of the book and the storyline.
The central premise to the book is interesting and holds definite promise. Wharton and Travers had collaborated on an investigation into the murder of an actor-manager, Charles Manfrey, in his own home. Despite there being relatively few suspects, and an argument was heard in the room just before Manfrey was struck on the head with a poker, the investigative duo fail to get anywhere, after missing a vital clue, and the murder is marked as unsolved.
They get a second opportunity to solve the crime a couple of years later when a young woman, who turns out to have been Manfrey’s secretary, Violet Lancing, at the time of his murder, approaches Ellice’s agency after an attempt to blackmail her. Travers, who hears the conversation while hidden in an anteroom, recognises the voice, and while he realises that the woman is being economical with the truth, is intrigued to know why she is being blackmailed and whether it has anything to do with Manfrey’s murder.
Of course, it does, but in true Bush fashion, the plot is much more complex than that but the various, seemingly unconnected, strands do come together after a fashion, not before Travers is knocked out by a mysterious character whose role is pivotal and whose identity betrayed by a physical characteristic, and Violet is murdered, strangled in a lonely part of Hampstead Heath. Even so, there are several attempts to come up with a rational explanation of the crimes which fits all the facts, and the resolution, in part, comes from a death bed confession, and finally a realisation that a trick as old as detective fiction itself had been played on Wharton and Travers to get them off the scent of Manfrey’s killer.
Murder, blackmail, ambition, an unfortunate marriage almost instantly regretted all have their part to play in a book which, once it gets going, is entertaining enough, but falls some way short of his best.
