Bush, Christopher - The Case of the Missing Minutes (1937)

Review by Nick Fuller

4/5

A definite improvement on 100% Alibis, which it reworks to some degree. As before, the identity of the man who committed a justifiable murder (the victim was an extremely nasty child abuser but not a paedophile) is evident from the halfway point, and, as before, his alibi relies on the workings of a clock. Indeed, Bush’s plots do genuinely function like clockwork: they are concerned with minutiae, with the infinitesimal divisions of time, an emphasis which may account for the occasional sense of thinness. Here, the clocks motif is taken to its most extreme — and most ingenious — limit: there are two clocks which have been manipulated independently, giving the murderer a genuinely unbreakable alibi.