Farnol, Jeffery -- The Loring Mystery (1925)

Hoick your lug'oles back, messmates, for a prolonged session of mawkish Dickensian sentiment and badly-rendered eighteenth-century Cockney slang, as Bow Street Runner Jasper Shrig pries into the circumstances surrounding the returning heir to Loring Hall. Missing heirs returning from foreign parts are not noted for their sagacity, but David Loring beats all previous records in thick-headedness as he blunders witlessly from one peril to another. Bashed into amnesia by an agent of his wicked uncle Nevil, he is recovering nicely in Shrig's care until he takes it on himself to stroll down to Sussex where, in the best cartoon tradition, another blow on the head restores his memory. The omniscient Shrig tracks him down, o'course, but not before David has faced death again and become implicated in said uncle's murder. Being American-born, David speaks largely in grunts, but that doesn't stop him falling for Anticlea, the beautiful, tempestuous ward that Uncle Nevil is reserving for his own debauchery. All this takes an unconscionable length of time, but by page 255 the murder has been pinned on the least likely suspect, David and the newly tamed but still virginal Anticlea are a pair, Providence has engineered a startling number of excruciatingly unlikely coincidences, and Shrig and his iron hat are back in Bow Street.

There is something appealing in Farnol's devotion to rendering the minutiae of a simpler, sunnier world. His characters are cardboard, but they are brightly coloured and finely decorated. It would be interesting to compare his works with Carr's slightly later approach to the same milieu. But when remember that when this melodrama was published Christie was already plotting The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, it shows how shallow and feeble Farnol's use of the investigation motif really is. Small wonder if he seems to have dropped totally out of sight today.

The Loring Mystery is available from Gutenberg Australia: gutenberg.net.au/ebooks09/0900891.txt

Jon.