Mr Pottermack’s Oversight
A review of Mr Pottermack’s Oversight by R Austin Freeman – 241022
It is some time since I have read anything by Richard Austin Freeman but the recent reissue of the nineteenth novel in his Dr Thorndyke series, originally published in 1930, as part of the British Library Crime Classics series seemed a perfect opportunity to renew my acquaintance with the forensic lawyer. Freeman’s prose style is wordy, never using one where ten will do the same job, and precisely detailed, leaving the reader no opportunity to make an assumption. The result is a novel that is probably twice as long as it needed to be.
Nevertheless, it is an entertaining tale and although Marcus Pottermack has been instrumental in causing another man’s death and goes to ingenious and ludicrous lengths to cover up his traces, it is hard not to feel sympathetic towards his plight, not least because much of the narrative is told from his perspective. Indeed, he would have got away with it but for a combination of circumstances, firstly to use Freeman’s delicious turn of phrase, his setting “forth along that perilous track beaten smooth by the feet of those who do not know when to let well alone” and then when the case comes before the scientific curiosity of one Dr John Thorndyke.
In the prologue to the story we come across an escaped convict who is able to evade the search party by changing into some clothing he finds discarded on a beach by a suicidal bather. A body is washed up some weeks later and it is assumed to be that of the escapee. The story then moves on fifteen years or so later to an unostentatious bachelor, Marcus Pottermack, his surname a play on the name of the ship in which he travelled to America, the Potomac, who decides to buy a sun dial to make a feature in his walled garden. As he makes preparations to install the sun dial he discovers a hidden well.
It comes as no surprise to learn that Pottermack is the escaped convict, but unfortunately for him his secret has been rumbled by a local bank manager, Lewison, who had framed him for his original conviction, and uses his knowledge of Pottermack’s true identity to blackmail him. In a violent altercation following the latest demand for money, Lewison, trips, is killed, and ends up down the well. Pottermack, in the first of a number of disastrous decisions, decides to close up the well and cover up any traces of the fatal encounter. To add a further complication to Pottermack’s situation, he has fallen for Mrs Bellard, who just happens to be Lewison’s estranged wife who is also being blackmailed and to whom, up until his conviction, the youthful Pottermack was engaged.
There is much misplaced ingenuity in Pottermack’s attempts to wipe the slate clean, including laying a trail of false footprints that lead away from his garden to a wood, obtaining a set of clothing that matches Lewison’s to go with the coat left in his summerhouse, and, ludicrously, the purchase of an Egyptian mummy, something that always comes in handy when hiding a murder.
Thorndyke does some consultancy work for the bank where Lewison worked and was interested to study the results of a new camera which took sequential photographs of the footprints that ran from the road to Pottermack’s gate and then to the woods. His trained eye immediately spots a difference – it is all to do with the rotation of heel screws – but his interest is purely academic until it is awakened once more by the discovery of what is assumed to be Lewison’s body and the subsequent inquest. Despite knowing that the body has been wrongly identified, Thorndyke keeps quiet.
The long anticipated encounter between Thorndyke and Pottermack concludes the book, Thorndyke rather drily reconstructing the latter’s actions and pointing out his mistakes, numerous as they are, but the most serious being ignoring a physical blemish and the screws, before making a momentous decision upon which Pottermack’s fate hangs.
An inverted murder mystery which occasionally veers towards the ludicrous, it is an entertaining read.
