THE FATAL FIVE MINUTES (1932)

Review by Nick Fuller

3/5

The first novel to feature Walling’s famous Philip Tolefree, who, despite Pronzini’s summary, is very far from being a fatuous silly ass. The crime here is the murder at his country-house of a financier, Farrar’s friend and Tolefree’s client, and the ingredients are all stock: adultery, romantic complications, a blackmailing butler and nocturnal prowls. However, all these conventional ingredients form an agreeable book. The reader should be able to identify the murderer through a process of logical elimination halfway through, although many of the clues which help Tolefree solve the case (including his “faculty of deduction from physiognomy”) aren’t shared with the reader.

Like Bentley, R.A.J. Walling was a British journalist. Walling's The Fatal Five Minutes (1932) is a very minor British Golden Age detective novel. The first two chapters are not bad. These first introduce Walling's series sleuth Philip Tolefree, and then set up a web of relationships among the principal characters (and suspects). But nothing much of interest happens after that. Walling's detective story technique here is to have his suspects running endlessly around the murder scene before and during the crime, creating alibis and confusion. This does not build up much of a puzzle plot. There is also a very implausible subplot about blackmail. Walling's techniques, and his central puzzle plot gimmick (not revealed here), recall E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case. So does the country house family with sinister romantic secrets plot. So does the treatment of the servants as serious suspects, something not always found in Golden Age mystery fiction. So does his smooth narrative tone, and air of offering a low key but judgmental and rather satirical and critical look at moneyed people from a middle class perspective. Both books feature a beautiful young woman unhappily married to a wealthy older man. Both also have sympathetic upper class young men among their suspects. Even the name of his detective parallels Bentley's Philip Trent. Walling's influence is a direct one from Bentley; he has little in common with the realist school, and his country house mystery seems closer in tone instead to Christie, Marsh, Innes, and other 1930's British authors.

Mike Grost