Bush, Christopher - The Case of the Second Chance (1946)

Review by Nick Fuller

2/5

Although not as bad as Barzun thought, certainly not one of the author’s triumphs. Travers and Wharton come to the conclusion that the unpleasant actor - manager was murdered by one of four people (secretary, housekeeper and two actors), and are stonewalled for the next two hundred pages. This is a mistake, because it leads to disassociation and loss of interest; not even a blackmail case and the strangling of the client three years later can really make amends. The detection is the worst sort of humdrum (much waiting and following, very little thinking), and hardly bolsters up one of the author’s slightest plots. The solution is reasonable, but suffers from the annoying use of that “hoary old trick,” the gramophone (why didn’t the accomplice take it with her when she got married? Or even dispose of it entirely?). The alibi in the first murder is full of holes: if A and B enter a shop and A asks for the time to which B gives the wrong time, surely it is not unlikely that the shopkeeper would look at the shop clock, whereupon the whole alibi would crumble?

I wasn't as negative about this as Nick - it's my first Bush for a long while, and I quite enjoyed it. Two hundred pages is a bit of an exaggeration - my copy was only 215 pages long - and a good deal of investigation goes on during the interim, aided by the odd coincidence. I admit I had trouble distinguishing the male suspects, and I had worked out the masquerade quite some time before it was revealed, but there were still plenty of things for Wharton and Travers to puzzle through, and occasional elements of humour. The continual recurrence of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar - as well as providing a clue -- helped to tie the whole thing together.

As for clocks: this is an issue that recurs in The Hollow Man by Carr. Historians may be able to help: just how abundant were clocks in 1930s-1940s London, and how likely were they to be correct?

Jon.