IN BRIEF: Death at Ash House - Miles Burton

When I started Death at Ash House (1942) I was ready for some kind of riff on haunted houses or shunned houses or abandoned houses with a curse. Take your pick of whatever subgenre you'd like to call this kind of mystery. Considering the original UK title is This Undesirable Residence -- the ironic opposite of the standard euphemism employed in real estate advertisements -- the house should have been more than a gloomy setting. It could have transformed into a foreboding character, but it just sort of sits there in the background. Burton in his John Rhode guise would have no doubt played up the setting a bit more as he did in the neo-Gothic detective novel The Bloody Tower.  I was disappointed. But not as disappointed with how plodding the book moves along in its first half. This humdrum mystery novel definitely earns that epithet coined by Julian Symons to describe routine, often unimaginative, detective fiction that maintains a strict adherence to detection at the expense of nearly everything else that makes a mystery novel a delightful reading experience. The police work in the first half of this book is close to drudgery with multiple solutions proposed, analyzed and re-analyzed to the point of utter aggravation. Strange all these permutations of who did what and why when the story itself seems deceptively simple.

S.H. Apperley and his secretary/companion Walter Bristow. The two men  are in the process of relocating. Bristow has been charged with checking out a few houses for purchase while Apperley sets himself up in a temporary residence. Bristow was to have visited one final house, then meet his employer at the real estate office and then make their final move into the temporary location.  But the car, laden down with five suitcases three of which contain a valuable stamp collection, and Bristow have gone missing. Apperley goes to the police to report the missing man and car. Eventually, the police find the car parked in front of Ash House. Bristow is dead, his head based in, and all of the luggage is gone. Ash House is in a forlorn neighborhood, in the shadow of a heavily forested area, and the locals tend to avoid the place because it's so lonely and abandoned. The immediate thought is that Bristow has fallen victim to a marauding thief who saw an opportunity to steal the luggage and conked Bristow on the head, probably not intending to kill. The discovery of the murder weapon, a strange metal disc that turns out to be a piece of equipment taken from a water boiler, changes that supposition to definitely intended murder. 

Somewhere around the halfway mark when I was truly ready to skip more re-analysis, jump to the end and find out the answers to three of the many unanswered questions that to me seemed utterly baffling there was a surprise second murder of a character who had never appeared in the book until her dead body was found. Inspector Arnold of Scotland Yard and local policeman Inspector Prickett do some of the best detective work in the novel in determining the identity of the dead woman. When they learn her name there is an unexpected coincidence that sends the whole plot into a new direction. I began to suspect that there would be an upheaval in the entire story. Then Arnold finds a typewritten letter in the woman's room at a boarding house for elderly people where she lived and worked and I had an "Aha!" moment. I literally gasped aloud and saw exactly what Burton had done.

For the remainder of the novel I waited for the final revelation and I was 100% correct. I was delighted and proud of my detective work. For that upheaval in the plot alone this book deserves attention. Initially the plot unravels ever so methodically (often dully, I will admit) and then suddenly is invigorated, so to speak, by the unfortunate second murder. Once the woman is identified the story picks up and some of the best characters appear. The brief interrogation of the stern woman who runs the old people's home and, immediately following, the questioning of the only friendly employee at the same place, a friend of the murdered woman, are highlights in this second half.  Also worth noting is the section where Arnold and Prickett visit and discuss the Napleys, a gypsy family who are working as migrant farmers in the neighborhood picking fruit and vegetables. The bigotry associated with "travellers" and Romany people crops up leading to the ultimate assessment that Isaac Napley, the eldest son of the family known to police for petty theft and trouble-making, most likely is behind the luggage theft and probably the murder of the two victims. However, nothing so predictably prosaic will solve these complex crimes.

THINGS I LEARNED:  Inspector Prickett tells Arnold that the Napleys are not true Romany.  He says: "They're what folks in this part of the country call diddikys".  I know The Diddakoi by Rumer Godden, a novel about gypsy folk that I read as a teenager. I thought, "Are they the same word?"  Indeed they are!  In fact, here is the full list of variants for the word in addition to the spellings already offered: didicoy, diddicoy, and didikai.  There are probably several other spellings with double Ds or single Ds in the second syllable but I'll stop with those three. However you decide to spell the word the term is used to describe people who are not "full blooded" Romany, a mixed race person of half Romany (or any other fraction) plus any other race or ethnicity.

While not one of the most stellar examples of a Miles Burton mystery novel Death at Ash House or This Undesirable Residence is definitely worth reading should you be lucky enough to come across a copy.  It's a rare one indeed. I've never seen a UK edition though the DJ is thankfully stored among the thousands of pictures at the Facsimile Dust Jackets website. I'm unsure if it was ever published either in the US or UK in a paperback edition. No paperback edition turns up when I looked for copies at bookselling sites.  Certainly, the second half of the novel is much improved over its somewhat drearily constructed first half.  The ultimate reveal is cleverly laid out in fair ply style clues. Not too obvious, but with some out of the box thinking the final surprise can be arrived at well before Inspector Arnold delivers the whopper of a surprise to Prickett