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The Case with Nine Solutions

Page history last edited by Jon 11 years, 9 months ago

Connington, JJ - The Case with Nine Solutions (1928)

 

 

Review by Nick Fuller

5/5

In this early Connington (his sixth), Sir Clinton Driffield is at the very peak of his form — acerbic, sardonic and cynical — as he investigates four murders (beginning with that of an egomaniacal would-be rapist, who gets nothing less than his just desserts), which he reconstructs most ingeniously, and complicated by the clever code letters sent by “Mr. Justice.” Although the Nine Solutions themselves are disappointing, being only the mathematical permutations and combinations of the crimes, everything else about the book is of the highest order. In a complex plot, the author has a firm grasp on all the threads: the choice of red herrings, clues, motives and suspects is excellent; and every page teems with good ideas, including some highly ingenious scientific dodges. Only the final solution (Excerpts from Sir Clinton’s Notebook) seems a bit long — methinks the author doth protest too much.

 


J.J. Connington's The Case With Nine Solutions (1928) has some features that remind one of H.C. Bailey. It deals not with a straightforward single crime, but a complex coincidence laden tangle perpetrated by two villains, operating independently of each other. At the center is a horrendous science based scheme victimizing a woman. Another woman, a maid, is brutally murdered. A third science based plot occurs at the finale, putting the detective in jeopardy. The book also falls in the same place along the realist-intuitionist axis as Bailey. There are a good deal of science based criminal schemes, but little use of science based detection. There are none of the structural interests of the realist school, such as alibis, backgrounds, or the "breakdown of identity". Instead all of the detection and most of the puzzle plotting is straightforwardly in the intuitionist mode. All of this reminds one of Bailey. There is much less of a thriller element here than in H.C. Bailey, however, and Connington's prose is much plainer.

 

Connington is an exceptionally cold and heartless writer; no one in the book seems to have the slightest sign of human compassion or warmth. Also, his plot is a mess, and the detection routine, with the exception of the science based elements in the tale. The book is not recommended at all. Warning: The title suggests that this is a mystery in the tradition of E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case, Ellery Queen's The Greek Coffin Mystery, or Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case, dealing with multiple, successive solutions. This is not so. Instead, the 9 solutions are all routine permutations of each other, and are discussed as a group one third the way through the case, in Chapter 6.

 

A comic footnote to the book: in Chapter 15 Connington introduces a middle aged maid called Mrs. Marple. Today no one would dream of naming a character this, but in 1928 the first of the series of Miss Marple stories that would make up Agatha Christie's The Tuesday Night Club Murders were just appearing in magazines. (There is some evidence that the single non series story "Death by Drowning" appeared in 1926, which would make it the first Miss Marple tale of all.)

 

The best parts of The Case with Nine Solutions are the opening chapters (1 - 5). The beginning is virtually a quotation of R. Austin Freeman: it deals with a young doctor, serving as a substitute for another, who is called out to a mysterious house where he witnesses the aftermath of a crime. This is a common initial situation in Freeman's books. But nothing that comes thereafter is especially Freeman like, and the doctor himself drops out of the work after a while. The opening scenes of driving through a foggy night are quite effective. They have a vivid tactile quality missing in much of the later novel. They also have a historical aspect, showing today's reader what driving was like in the 1920's.

 

Mike Grost

 

See also: http://at-scene-of-crime.blogspot.com/2011/10/nine-possible-answers.html and

http://doyouwriteunderyourownname.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/forgotten-book-case-with-nine-solutions.html

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