Connington, JJ - The Ha-ha Case (1934) aka The Brandon Case

One of the better Conningtons, turning on some nice points of ballistics and English law.  A country house setting, and rather a gloomy one at that.  Series detective Clinton Driffield presides.

Curt Evans

A

One of the best Conningtons—up there with The Case with Nine Solutions, The Sweepstake Murders, The Castleford Conundrum, and Jack-in-the-Box.  It took me a while to warm to Connington’s 1930s books—I found them much drier and more humdrum (more detection-focused) than the faster-paced, more melodramatic books of the 1920s such as Murder in the Maze.  There’s a difference between the books published after Nemesis at Raynham Parva: they’re more obviously Croftsian, with the bulk of the detection done by a local professional policeman, with Sir Clinton Driffield and Squire Wendover appearing much less (c.f. Sweepstake Murders, Castleford Conundrum).  This one is set in 1924, several years before Raynham Parva, but Driffield and Wendover don’t appear until p. 243, and the unlikeable Inspector Hinton, self-satisfied and ambitious, does most of the detection, Driffield making sense of the facts he gathered.

The plot is excellent.  The problem is the murder / suicide / accidental death of a young man in a shooting party.  There are only four suspects, and the real culprit is not too difficult to spot.  The mystery involves a legal problem (borough English / ultimogeniture; barred entail; insurance policy; victim shot on his 21st birthday) and ballistics (trajectory, etc.).  Connington does a superb job of showing the evidence, and then explaining what it means, in a clear, lucid and logical manner—the Inspector constructs a water-tight case against Laxford and Hay (motive; opportunity), which Driffield then quietly demolishes.  The clue of the absent blood-stain, which seems to prove that they lied about moving the body but which Driffield vindicates on medical grounds (the bone blocking the blood vessel), is particularly fine.  Although not a sensational SURPRISE! Story, this is thoroughly satisfying, and highly recommended to all who enjoy old-fashioned detective stories.

Connington under-rated.  Carries on Mason’s tradition of genuine detective story that also has characterisation (Miss Menteith’s poverty—pp. 18–19; the sensuous Diana—risqué even by modern standards; and the unlikeable policeman).  First third establishes characters—could be a flaw that Una and Diana Laxford recede, but Connington gets away with it—more satisfying than Wade, because a better detective writer.  Second section is Inspector Hinton’s investigation; final third enry of Sir Clinton and explanations (deus ex machina?).

Nick Fuller.