Connington, JJ - For Murder Will Speak

Review by Jason Hall   2.5/5

For Murder Will Speak is my first reading experience of Connington and, judging from other posted book reviews, appears to be a representative title. Sir Clinton Driffield investigates a pair of suspicious deaths: a woman's body is found, hands and feet bound, floating in a Scottish burn; and a broker facing financial ruin is discovered with his head in a gas-oven. Both appear to be suicides, though motives for murder soon surface.

Connington is a smart plotter and a competent prose writer, and he seems to me an author in the tradition of--although a rung or two removed from--practicioners like John Rhode and E.R. Punshon. His detective, Sir Clinton (with Squire Wendover as his Watson), is nondescript and a little bland. The story here is interesting but rather disposable, further hampered by a rather obvious murderer with a faked alibi that is simple to see through. Since Connington is interested in the scientific and the technological to bolster his plots, this book has not aged well. For Murder Will Speak includes, among other details, short wave wireless modulation by varying a receiver's crystal size and a woman whose nymphomania has been corrected through a glandular adjustment. Also, the overuse of one phrase, "a poison pen production," is unintentionally comic; the alliterative slogan is repeated more than two dozen times throughout the book.

The title borrows from Hamlet: Murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.