Bush, Christopher - The Case of the Corner Cottage (1951)

Review by Nick Fuller

3/5

Bush is clearly in his middle stage by now, for he has moved away from the elaborate alibis of his 1930s work to a style and approach resembling the American 'hard-boiled' school. Ludovic Travers runs his own detective agency, and vows to solve the murder off his own bat when one of his operatives is murdered - à la The Maltese Falcon. There is very little interest in finding out the murderer's identity; indeed, we know almost from the beginning who the villain is; instead, the chief interest is in the unwinding of a trail leading from the burglary of the corner cottage back to a murder and forward to another, involving a rather depressingly sordid professional crime milieu. Fortunately, there is plenty of interest in the second half (the first comes to a grinding halt but picks up again with what appears to be a rather staggering coincidence), the details all fit neatly together, and, although the reader will anticipate most of the solution, there is a neat twist at the end. Some Spadework.