Wallace, Edgar - The Clue of the Silver Key (1930)

By 1930 Wallace was beginning to run out of steam, and The Clue of the Silver Key, though full of interesting ideas, never quite came together as a coherent story for me. We are introduced to the stock characters; Dick Allenby the inventor and his fiancee, the resourceful but reckless Mary Lane; the miserly old financier Hervey Lyne, whose money provides the motivation for the plot, a bank manager, Leo Moran, and a couple of underworld fringe-dwellers, Jerry Dornford and Mike Hennessey. Unfortunately most of them -- with the exception of Mary Lane -- have little to do, and the progress of the plot is largely left to another of Wallace's dogged Scotland Yard detectives, Surefoot Smith.

There are the makings of a mystery here: how was a man shot in the open air, with his valet in close attendance? What is the significance of the silver key and the vacuum pump? -- but they are lost in the rush of events which eventually brings the story to a natural end about three-quarters of the way through the book. Not one but two chases are added for padding, and there is a good deal of solemn nonsense about a 'new and dangerous' kind of criminal to try and justify it all, but apart from the dogged Surefoot Smith, Mary Lane's experiments in detection, and the very occasional flash of Wallace's humour, there is little to recommend this book.

Jon.