Walling, RAJ - THE STROKE OF ONE (1931)

Review by Nick Fuller

2/5

One of the prime examples of the Detection Club’s rule that “no Chinaman must figure in the story.” The book opens with two Chinamen speaking broad Kai Lung in San Francisco; continues in England with the murder of the squire, a celebrated Chinese traveller, in the local church; and features a remarkably silly thriller section halfway through, where the elderly narrator and two bright young things escape from the sensible detection of the English sections to London, there to take part in an Edgar Wallace story. They infirtlate an oprium dlen, and glet involvred in a porice laid—the sleege yerrow pellirous. Having escaped from the clutches of these fiendish Orientals (or, rather, been let go), they are nearly arrested by the police, only to be let go because the narrator has friends in high places. All the characters return to the countryside, where a fairly arbitrary murderer is revealed.