When Lord Wellacombe, Secretary of State for India, collapses in the House of Commons while he is introducing a Bill giving the Government draconian powers to suppress Indian independence agitators, everyone believes it is a stroke until tests reveal that he has been poisoned. The Cabinet is in a dilemma as they know that notes have been received from someone calling himself 'The Brown Hand', warning that anyone who tries to introduce the Bill will die. The threat is proved to be no empty one when the next Minister to attempt the feat dies in a nearly identical manner to Wellacombe. While most of the Cabinet now want to postpone the Bill, the Prime Minister, Franklin, is determined to press on and decides that he will introduce the Bill himself. It is up to our hero and protagonist, Lord Arthur Linton, the Under-secretary for India, to solve the mystery and save the Prime Minister's life.
If one wanted to find a book which would be almost guaranteed to give a newcomer an aversion to Golden Age mysteries it might be hard to find a better candidate than Death in The House. The politics manage to be both crudely reactionary and cartoon-like, the characters are cardboard stereotypes, the romance stiflingly dull, the solution in terms of 'how' is an absurd technical mechanism and in terms of 'who' baffling only in the sense that it is the blindingly obvious suspect who turns out to have 'done it'. 'Bad' does not begin to describe this book.
Nick Hay.
Comments (1)
Jon said
at 11:36 am on Jul 4, 2011
I'm not quite as negative about it as Nick, but his criticisms are valid -- and one could also add that the police and forensic investigators are all staggeringly incompetent to boot. But the main investigator is an attractive character, and his slow-burn romance with the Prime Minister's daughter is nicely handled. I give it a B minus.
Jon.
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