| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

The Middle Temple Murder

Page history last edited by Jon 15 years ago

Fletcher, JS - The Middle Temple Murder (1918)

 

Long said to be Fletcher's best detective novel and the novel that led to his great success in the United States in the 1920s (the latter based, according to Howard Haycraft, on the praise given to the book by Woodrow Wilson*), The Middle Temple Murder is, in fact, the best book by Fletcher I have read, though it still is inferior to Golden Age classics.

 

What made this book stand out for me among the many Fletchers is its more modern feel (even though it is set around 1912).  The murder is urban (though there is an excursion at the climax to Feltcher's home turf, Yorkshire) and the investigator is a personable newsman, one Spargo.  Chapters are consistently short, suggestive of serial publication, and everything moves with zip.  There is no elaborate characterization, but there is nothing objectionable about it either.  Love interest is the merest whisper.

 

Fletcher manages to withhold the murderer's identity until the next to last page, but, disappointingly, the solution is handed to Spargo on a plate.  Whether a conviction even could be obtained is questionable, but Fletcher conveniently scamps the whole issue in a rushed (less than one page!) conclusion.  Until this point, Spargo diligently investigates, but he makes no scintillating deductions.  The mystery plot lacks the wonderful complexity of books by Freeman, Sayers, Rhode, Crofts, Christie and other Golden Age masters.

 

Not at all a bad book, but not a great classic.  Perhaps Fletcher was the Louis Spohr Golden Age detection?

 

*Haycraft gives no citation for his Woodrow Wilson account, though I have traced it back to at least 1934.  Haycraft seems to get the year of the novel's publication wrong (he says 1918, but 1919 appears correct?), and I'm rather dubious that the book owes ALL its success to Woodrow Wilson (he wasn't that popular by that time).  It appears to have been the first Fletcher mystery published in the U.S. and it received very good print reviews, so maybe the credit should go to Fletcher for writing the book and breaking away from his rather old-fashioned, gaslit, melodramatic style.

 

Curt

 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.