Published in 1940, this was the penultimate Rupert Penny novel. Again it features Chief Inspector Edward Beale and (this time in a limited role in the latter part of the book) Tony Purdon, assistant editor of The Stockbroker, who is Beale's 'best friend and his invariable companion when there was murder to be solved'. The book is structured interestingly: the first section is called 'The Victim Alive' and the second 'The Victim Dead'. In a very different way, Penny was doing what Agatha Christie did four years later in Towards Zero: focusing at length on the events leading up to the murder before coming to the investigation of the crime itself. His manipulation of the reader's assumptions is clever and is the book's main strength. This is a plot-driven tale, firmly within the classic whodunit tradition - there is even an 'Interlude', when the reader is challenged, in the Ellery Queen fashion, to determine the murderer's identity 'from the evidence supplied in the preceding chapters'. This must have been one of the last times such a gimmick was used in a British detective novel. The school setting of the book is well done and there are pleasing touches of humour in the early chapters, although once the crime is committed, the story becomes rather bogged down with speculation about the means by which the poison was administered and there are not enough interesting suspects for the mystery to be judged a complete success, even by the standards of its time. Nevertheless, I found this an enjoyable read and continue to regret that Penny's crime writing career was so brief.
Martin
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