John Bude’s The Lake District Murder – More Golden Age British Mystery

Book #31 of 2024

This is the second murder mystery from John Bude (who was actually Ernest Elmore). In an earlier post, I reviewed his first book, The Cornish Coast Murder, which I enjoyed a lot. The Lake District Murder (1935) introduces Bude’s Inspector Meredith, a dogged police inspector who carefully searches for clues until he has enough to construct a plausible explanation for how the crime could have been committed.

In The Lake District Murder, a gas station attendant (oops, I mean petrol station attendant) is found dead, sitting in a car with a mackintosh over his head and a length of hose running from the car’s exhaust to under the mackintosh. A clear case of suicide, until Meredith notices that the dead man, Clayton, has clean hands, which is unusual for someone who was supposedly working at an oily and greasy job. Also, there is a nice dinner set on his table, uneaten.

After further investigation, Meredith discovers that Clayton is engaged to be married, he has 2000 pounds in his bank account (an enormous sum in Depression-era Britain), and he was planning on emigrating with his fiancée to Canada. All facts that argue against suicide.

Meredith convinces his superior to authorize an autopsy, and sure enough, there are traces of a drug, Trional, in his system, which would have knocked him out. So, the inescapable conclusion is that he was murdered! What follows is an interesting hunt to unravel the reason why anyone would want to kill poor young Clayton. It’s a hunt that takes Meredith all over the county, as he slowly but surely uncovers an extensive network of illegal distilleries and bootleggers.

Through an ingenious use of petrol delivery trucks (oops, I mean lorries), one of the most well-respected citizens of the Lake District is making a mint selling contraband whiskey. Bude’s explanation of the mechanics of the operation are little too Rube Goldberg in their complexity, but they remain plausible. Suffice it to say, Meredith ties all the threads together, and justice is served.

Bude does a good job of describing various local characters in the course of the novel, and the reader gains a good understanding of how British law enforcement is structured and operates. It’s quite different from the American system. For example, Meredith has no hesitation about breaking and entering businesses and private homes without a warrant in his search for evidence.

Like The Cornish Coast Murder, The Lake District Murder isn’t a real puzzle as to who done it, but it makes for an enjoyable read. No one is ever in any danger (except for poor young Clayton), and solving the murder is simply a matter of collecting enough evidence to nail the culprits. Bude was quite popular at the same time as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, and while he is not a writer of their caliber, it’s nice to have his novels available in inexpensive Kindle editions. I’ll definitely be reading more of the adventures of Inspector Meredith.

John Bude’s Cornish Coast Murder – A Golden Age British Mystery

Book #29 of 2024

It occurred to me as I read John Bude’s The Cornish Coast Murder that we live in miraculous times. The only reason I was aware of John Bude is because I got a newsletter in my email inbox from Abe Books, an online used book seller. The newsletter discussed a series of classic British mysteries from the 1920s to the 1950s. The Cornish Coast Murder looked interesting, so I went on Amazon using my Kindle, and sure enough, it was available for the whopping sum of $1.99. So I bought it, and within seconds I was reading it in my favorite chair.

None of that would have been possible 30 years ago in 1994 – email was just getting widespread, but it was very primitive. Kindles did not exist. Amazon did not exist! Home Wi-Fi didn’t exist; if you went online, it was via a very slow dial-up modem, and you probably were only on AOL or Compuserve. The internet as we know it was just beginning to get going. Anyway, I think it’s pretty amazing that I can read an obscure British author’s book for less than two bucks, and I never have to leave my house to acquire it near-instantaneously.

So how is The Cornish Coast Murder? Not bad! It was John Bude’s first effort, published in 1935. This was a golden age for British mystery, with Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Edgar Wallace at the height of their popularity. As a matter of fact, in the opening chapter, the Reverend Dodd, vicar of the the tiny village of Boscawen, and his best friend, Dr. Pendrill, eagerly open a crate containing a selection of books by Wallace, Christie, Sayers, J. S. Fletcher, and Freeman Wills-Croft. As they are enjoying a postprandial smoke and sherry, the telephone rings, and it is Ruth Tregarthan, who lives in Greylings – an isolated stone house on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic. Her uncle’s been murdered!

What follows is a fairly formulaic mystery – how was Julius Tregarthan shot in the head when there is no sign of entry, and there are no footprints outside on the muddy path except for Ruth’s? As the story develops, Ruth comes under suspicion, as well as Ronald Hardy, a young man she is in a relationship with that her uncle has violently opposed. Inspector Bigswell doggedly gathers clues and comes up with various theories as to how the murder could have been committed. He welcomes Rev. Dodd’s help, who has a self-described “intuition method” of solving crimes. 

As with most classic mysteries, it turns out Julius Tregarthan was no saint, and he had made many enemies. No one is really sorry to see him gone. My only quibble with the novel is that eventual culprit is someone who is mentioned only briefly early on. Bigswell and Dodd laboriously construct scenarios to fit the changing facts, and Bude can get bogged down in unnecessary complications. However, for a first effort, The Cornish Coast Murder is a well-crafted classic mystery that is a lot of fun to escape for a few hours into. It’s definitely worth a couple of bucks, as far as entertainment value goes.

John Wyndham’s Foul Play Suspected: An Entertaining Early Effort

John Wyndham (1903 – 1969) is best known for his science/speculative fiction books, of which The Day of the Triffids is the best known. Foul Play Suspected was his second novel (the less said of his first, The Secret People, the better), published in 1935, is not science fiction at all, but rather a mystery/suspense tale set in England between the two world wars.

It opens with Phyllida Shiffer – yikes, what a name to burden a woman with! – returning home after a three year stint in India. She is now a widow, and it soon becomes clear that her husband is not mourned by her at all. Her father, Henry Woodridge, is a somewhat eccentric scientist who has a laboratory on the grounds of his estate, The Grange. When Phyllida arrives, the place is empty with all the furniture under sheets, as if her father had planned to leave for an extended period of time.

She can’t get any information about where he might have gone, so she goes to London to see her cousin, Derek Jameson, and find out if he knows anything. He is living in a flat with his friend Barry Long, whom Phyllida dumped to marry Ronald Shiffer. Neither of them have any clue as to where her father might be. She returns to The Grange, and as she is about to eat a quick dinner in the empty house, there’s a knock on the door, and she is swiftly abducted.

From that promising beginning, there unfolds a tale of industrial espionage, murder, and the potential end of the human race. Unfortunately, when he wrote this novel, Wyndham still hadn’t developed a distinctive style. I can tell he’s trying to create a Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie type of story, but none of the characters are really fleshed out. Derek, the putative hero, makes all kinds of wisecracks, but instead of making him endearing, he just comes across as insensitive and snarky. Barry might as well be a piece of furniture. The villain, Ferris Draymond, Director of Amalgamated Chemicals, is as clichéd as his company’s name.

The most interesting character, Detective-Inspector Jordan of Scotland Yard, is very good. Taciturn, smart, and empathetic, he redeems the novel. However, despite his best-laid plans, Draymond manages to outwit him in the end. There is a relatively satisfying ending, but it doesn’t resolve the main issue, which is what will become of a formula for an incredibly lethal poison gas.

Wyndham wrote this in 1935, when it was becoming more and more clear that Germany was re-arming for another war. He includes some prescient commentary on how arms races escalate, and how fragile civilization is. Here’s Jordan talking about how bleak things look for the twentieth century:

“The twentieth century,” said Jordan, “looks like being the bloodiest century on record before it is finished — and I’m not thinking of the war. The system’s rotting. It’s like a city of great buildings. Up in the turrets, on the roof gardens there is clean air in which thrives a clean culture of magnificent possibilities; down below is the accumulated filth and stench of centuries with the foundations rotting among it. … You nicely comfortable people like to think of the bad old days, you pat yourselves on the back because there is more freedom, less cruelty, less meanness in high places than there was a couple of centuries ago. There isn’t. But you’re shut off from it all — you don’t see it. We do. It’s there, and it’s growing. Right under the noses of the really educated class — who, I grant you, aim at a high standard — there is a moral rot spreading like a slow disease. Don’t ask me where it comes from, I don’t know, but it’s there. A callousness, a careless, unnecessary cruelty, a return to Nature. The barriers which civilized, educated men have tried to raise against the raw, the savage and the cruel have never been consolidated, and now they’re giving way. You don’t see quite so much of it in this country yet, but before the end of the century people in your circumstances will be brought face to face with it. You’ll put up shutters on your houses; you’ll go in twos at night.” Location 2558, Kindle edition

Unfortunately for us all, Wyndham’s predictions largely came true. In a few years, he would hit his stride penning such dystopian bestsellers as The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos, and Chocky. Foul Play Suspected is a flawed early attempt at what he would later excel at – creating believable and disturbing speculative fiction that makes the reader think.