Connington, JJ - The Twenty-one Clues (1941)

Often described as the most difficult of the Clinton Driffield mysteries to track down, this novel, originally published in 1942, may appear at first sight to be a simple re-working of his earlier adventure The Case with Nine Solutions, and therefore inferior. Certainly the initial problem, involving the discovery of the corpses of a man and a woman who appear to have been involved in some kind of intrigue, closely resembles the premise of the earlier story and this and the similarities in the titles might tempt the collector to believe that this is a second-rate rehash of the original idea.

Fortunately, things are not quite so bad as the reader might fear. This was the first Driffield book after Connington's brief departure into the world of wireless detective The Counsellor - who featured in only two books before being discarded for a return to his most successful series character. All the usual ingredients of the earlier Driffield mysteries are present and correct – the dry humour, the emphasis on scientific methods and the well-drawn picture of rural life. Here the detection turns not on the mathematical permutations of the crime but on the aforementioned clues, which are left behind after the crime. Driffield, who unfortunately does not appear until nearly half way through the book, uses these to disentangle the threads and there is some intelligent use of ballistic evidence, including a clever trick by the criminal to confuse the evidence. The book introduces a couple of minor characters, the dour Inspector Rufford and the journalist Peter Diamond, who reappears in No Past Is Dead, but Wendover is present and correct, if a little less integral than some of the earlier books.

While not reaching the heights of the best of his early efforts, this is a solid if not spectacular Connington and one the collector of the realist school will find well worth obtaining – if he or she is fortunate enough to track down a copy.

R E Faust