Review by Nick Fuller
4/5
MacDonald’s first novel (except for the two books written with his father), and the first appearance of Colonel Gethryn, special correspondent for The Owl — a Trentish figure, who falls in love with an enigmatic beauty and suspects the unconvincing secretary. Although he is, like the book itself, rather arch, he has a brain, which he sets to work to discover the murderer of the cabinet minister at his country house. The book is a better (i.e., more orthodox) detective story than later books, and is more pleasing, for it is longer and more controlled without deist apostrophes and recapitulations. The murderer is guessable, but a worse flaw, one of the few blemishes in an otherwise sound piece of work, is that the revelation of the murderer and his resulting descent into madness are unconvincingly melodramatic; Allingham was more successful in Death of a Ghost. The explanation is quite logical, although rather long-winded; thirty pages is too long for the explanation of a simple crime.