One of the things that most frustrates me about crime and detective novels is when the author springs a piece of previously unmentioned information that allows the detective to solve the case, usually right at the end of the book. It’s a trait most commonly found in novels from the earlier end of the so-called ‘Golden Age’, back there in the 1920s or so when the genre became ridiculously popular and every chancer took a punt at writing a thriller. Clifford Witting employs the, ahem, ‘technique’ in his 1938 novel ‘The Case Of The Michaelmas Goose’ (republished recently by Galileo). Witting is such a fine writer, however, that not only does his deployment of this little trick of the trade fail to frustrate, it actually brings a smile of pleasure, for there is a strong sense here that the author is having a great deal of fun playing with the very traditions of the genre in which he is participating. ’Locked room’ or ‘impossible crime’ element? Check. Glasses and fake beard disguise? Check. A victim who appears so perfectly unpleasant a character that we cannot but be rather pleased at his demise? Check. Romantic attraction between detective and suspect, setting up a professional duty/personal interest conflict? Check.

Everything makes for a tremendously well paced and entertaining piece of genre fiction that in its confidence both cosies into and transcends that very genre. Only historical hindsight allows us to position the book as a sort of knowing punctuation point in the genre’s development, yet it is nevertheless difficult to shake off that feeling. It feels faintly like an acknowledgment of the end of something. In this it seems to echo Witting’s ‘Midsummer Murder’, published the previous year (also reissued by Galileo) and filled with metaphorical threats of the approaching cataclysm. The symbolic elements of the 1937 novel may be missing in ‘Michaelmas Goose’ but is is nevertheless interesting to read the book at least partly as something which seeks to capture a last gasp of English society. One eye on an uncertain future, another on a past that is bound to failure. Things are not quite what they seem. Sacrifice is both honourable and despicable; money both an illusory source of freedom and of imprisonment. Love may not conquer all.

As mentioned, Witting employs the Second Rate Detective Novelist’s flimsy trick of withholding evidence from the reader until the end of the book, but gets away with it not just because he is a fine writer, but also because he splits the novel into two distinct books within the whole. The second of these is titled simply ‘The Killing’ and in it Witting employs another genre trope of unwinding the threads of a crime to which we already know the solution. Some readers will find these kinds of detective novels to be frustrating in themselves, simply because they do not allow the puzzle-solving mind to try and work things out and guess ‘whodunnit’, but I admit I find them, for the most part, very enjoyable. Their interest in the psychological and the process of policing feels more Modern and suggests the procedurals that become more prevalent in the post-WW2 years, and Witting does anticipate this to a degree. It also allows him to play to an extent with the traditions of the serialised thriller, and there are moments during ‘The Killing’ when one is put in mind of Ealing comedies ‘Hue and Cry’ and ‘The Lavender Hill Mob’. This is, as you will appreciate, No Bad Thing.

‘The Case Of The Michaelmas Goose’ then is both intellectually rewarding as a rumination on its own genre and a dashed fine read in its own right. It is also another piece of evidence that marks Clifford Witting out as one of the great unknowns, thankfully now reclaimed and given a new audience.

If we have Galileo Publishing to thank for bringing Clifford Witting back into the limelight, then we must thank them also for reissuing Joan Cockin’s work. Having already thoroughly enjoyed her 1949 novel ‘Villainy At Vespers’, in which her Inspector Cam character solves crime during a Cornish summer, I was looking forward to ‘Curiosity Killed The Cat’ in which Cam makes his first appearance. Although the cover blurb suggests it was also published in 1949, other evidence points to a 1947 first appearance courtesy of Holder and Stoughton. Regardless, ‘Curiosity’ shifts its action slightly Eastwards to the Cotswolds (although if one wanted to be pedantic the cover illustration is of the Exeter Guildhall and High Street in Devon) and takes the opportunity to examine the effects of Government intervention in the rural landscape. This intervention takes the form of a scientific research establishment transitioning from wartime weapons development to the invention of a new Super Fabric on which the success of Britain’s Export Drive depends. As with Witting, Cockin’s novel suggests another Ealing Comedy, this time ‘The Man In The White Suit’, although perhaps more important in the book is the conflict between urban and rural, between Progress and Tradition. There may also be something here about the local frustrations who see effort and resources being expended on the development of something for export rather than easing the difficulties of the home front, as it were. In this, the book does a fine job of gently puncturing the commonly propagated myth of a unified people grimly bearing hardship through wartime and peace. Here there are the human frailties of jealousy and greed, of passion and weakness of spirit and flesh. There is a thread too of espionage, where questions of betrayal of Nations and friendships rear their heads and are, naturally, uncomfortably confronted. Cockin sketches her characters with confident strokes, although oddly Inspector Cam comes across as just a little flimsy, as though the author is struggling to commit to him somewhat. Nevertheless, ‘Curiosity Killed The Cat’ is an excellent first outing for Cam, and the evidence of ‘Villainy at Vespers’ is that Cockin continued to develop her character and to write him some excellent mysteries. One can only hope that Galileo will also turn their hand to the third and final instalment of Cam’s investigations, the 1952 outing ‘Deadly Earnest’. I certainly have my fingers crossed on that front.

I hope too that Galileo will be publishing more by Max Murray, whose ‘The King and the Corpse’ (also originally published in 1949) is another recent reissue. Set in the French Riviera, the book is a lightweight romance thriller, in which Murray, like Cockin, weaves threads of Tradition versus Modern, though this time using the vehicle of a deposed monarchy battling usurping anarchists/republicans/corrupt self-serving lefties, in whose conflict the U.S.A. inevitably has an interested hand. It’s all Rather Good Fun and in the spirit of the likes of Leslie Charteris, to whose Simon Templar character Murray’s (anti)hero Anthony Tolworth might to be at least on nodding terms. There is certainly a fine amount of rip-roaring adventuring to be had as Tolworth seeks to defend his sweetheart Eve Raymond from the clutches of the French police who are equally determined to pin a charge of murder on her. It’s all marvellously ridiculous, with Tolworth’s employer (the aforementioned deposed Monarch) enthusiastically drawn into both the adventure and the romance. Also pulled into the affair is Tolworth’s Aunt Ethelreda, accompanied by two young boys from the prep school of which she is headmistress, all of whom prove essential in eventually unlocking the mystery of the murder that is unveiled in the opening paragraph.


There is something of a rather earthy Jane Marple about the Ethelreda character, and, intriguingly, I found myself also reminded of L.C. Tyler’s Elsie Thirkettle from his marvellous ‘Herring’ series of books. The other key character in those books is, of course, called Ethelred, so you could say that, with a bit of fudging and squeezing at the edges, the pieces of the puzzle fit. There is certainly too a shared humour between Tyler and Murray, both being rather marvellously forthright and deliciously witty. In Murray case, it might be easy to fall into stereotypes and suggest that his, ah, rather direct but enjoyable coarseness is informed by a youth as a bush boy in Australia, but equally it is as likely to be the result of years spent working in newspaper journalism and scriptwriting for the BBC. Certainly one gets the sense from ‘The King and the Corpse’ that Murray might be somewhat dismissive of any unnecessary baggage. Cut to the chase. Tell the story and keep it all moving.

Apparently Murray squeezed twelve novels into the years between the end of WW2 and his death in 1956, eleven of them featuring the word ‘corpse’ in the title. I rather hope that the resuscitation of ‘The King and the Corpse’ is the prelude to more of those being, ah, unearthed in the coming years.