Walling, RAJ - The Mystery of Mr Mock aka The Corpse With The Floating Foot (1937)

Review by Nick Fuller

4/5

A book that was praised by Torquemada when it first appeared, and condemned by Pronzini some fifty years later. As one would expect, Torquemada is correct. Even if this is not the author’s best book (so far, that position is held by Mr. Tolefree’s Reluctant Witnesses), it is his second best. It is, first and foremost, a genuine pleasure to read: rather leisurely paced, but allowing the reader to soak up the holiday atmosphere of an inn (converted mill, of which a map should have been provided, as it is not always easy to follow the characters’ movements) and enjoy the company of several well-drawn characters, including an amusing Professor of Philosophy (which allows Walling to discuss detection as philosophy, if not a branch of history) and a Puritanical land-owner. The detection is good, particularly the manner in which Tolefree discovers the corpse and, later, the jewels for which the crime was committed; and, although the movements are more than slightly muddled, the identity of the murderer is a good surprise: he should have been the first person we suspected, yet we didn’t.

Walling's The Corpse With the Floating Foot (1936) has some pleasant atmosphere. It takes place in a country inn, another Walling building with unusual architecture, being a converted mill. Like other of Walling's works, it is set in a small English town that is completely off the beaten track. There are recurrent themes in these books: inns and hotels as settings, and innkeepers as characters; lots of wandering around the hotels at night, with people constantly visiting each other's rooms; the mainly middle class characters, with one great house of the well to do nearby; an interest in waterworks; mysterious corpses, whose identity has been concealed by removing all identifying marks from their clothes and luggage; and strange disappearances. Foot continues Walling's interest in hearing: both Tolefree and the suspects get much of their information from listening.

Both Foot and the later The Corpse Without a Clue (1944) contain eccentric, self righteous characters who believe in taking the law into their own hands in a quest for justice, and gum up the works for the police and Tolefree. These characters also play a major role in complicating the plot of the novels, and adding to the mystification. Both books also share another kind of character: a learned philosophical individual, a vigorous, unpretentious man of around forty, who takes an enthusiastic amateur interest in crime detection. In 'Footwe are talking about a Professor of Moral Philosophy; in Clue, a Canon of a Cathedral Town. In both novels this character is vaguely comic, there being a contrast between his scholarly calling and his zest for detection.

Walling has plainly been reading Dorothy L. Sayers' The Nine Tailors (1934). Both the setting, involving a mill on a small river, and elements of the crime plot, recall Sayers' book. The mill and river location also recalls Knox' The Footsteps at the Lock (1928).

Bill Pronzini, in 1001 Midnights, has rightly complained of Walling's dullness, and his willingness to ramble. This 300 page book goes on way too long, and would be much better at half its length. The best parts are the chapters describing the original crime (Chapters 1 - 5). The story picks up again in Chapters 7.3 and 8.1, which discover the McGuffin driving the plot, and which also contribute to the physical setting which is the charm of the tale. The other best section of the book is Chapter 11.3, which reconstructs the actual murder itself, and which also involves the book's location. However, the rest of the solution in Chapter 12, shows no imaginative ideas. Walling's books contain huge amounts of dull sections. One hesitates to call this padding. It seems much more to be material that Walling tried to make interesting, and failed. In Foot's case, this often deals with the wanderings of the suspects around in the dark, or with Tolefree's endless reconstructions of these wanderings using deduction - often from very shaky premises, in my opinion. These reconstructions, and the use of logic to analyze them, seem vaguely in the tradition of Ronald Knox. Walling's books all tend to be in their best in their early sections, when they are unrolling their plots.

Mike Grost