MR TOLEFREE'S RELUCTANT WITNESSES (1936)

Review by Nick Fuller

4/5

Despite Walling’s reputation as tedious and fatuous, he devises quite a good puzzle in this story of a mystery man without a past found murdered near the wicket gate of his house, presumably while waiting to murder another man. Who that man is proves to be a very difficult problem both for Philip Tolefree and for the reader, as the plot soon becomes super-complex without being cluttered, the sort of mystifying puzzle the detective story should aim to be, with new facts and relations discovered in every chapter. Perhaps because of the complexity, though, the murderer’s identity is not as inevitable as it could, and should, have been.