Blake, Nicholas - There's Trouble Brewing (1937)

I haven't read any Blake in quite a while and enjoyed it on the whole, but -- besides one or two other quibbles -- there was what seemed to me a fatal flaw in the events leading to the denouement. The final event happens because a young man acts on certain instructions given him by phone. The problem in my eyes is that the man instructing him isn't wearing his false teeth. If you've ever spoken to someone with no teeth, you know their speech is extremely unclear, and as this person normally wore false ones he wouldn't even have practice in making himself understood. Add the telephone distortion and I just can't believe he'd be comprehensible.

Carola.

Nigel Strangeways is invited to give a literary talk at a village in Dorset where an old friend of his is the local doctor. Among the characters he meets on his arrival is the surly Eustace Bunnett, owner of the local brewery and a little Hitler among his employees and dependents. Bunnett hires Nigel to look into the death of his dog Truffles, who was found boiled to a skeleton in the pressure cooker at the brewery; but Nigel has hardly begun to investigate when a human body is found in the cooker, and later identified as Bunnett himself.

The book is nicely put together, the dialogue is entertaining, the characters are attractive -- it's a pity that the motivations are thin and the denouement is obvious. An experienced reader will have grasped the main threads by page 60 or so; and only incredible obtuseness on Nigel's part can explain why he doesn't do the same. Any detectival interest remaining is in the explanation of the minor events, and these are so beset by coincidence and the protagonists' inexplicable behaviour that there is really very little 'explanation' at all. Promising, but fatally flawed.

Jon.