Double Detection - Belton Cobb

THE STORY: Noel Ross, ex-police sergeant with Scotland Yard, has just ad an operation to remove shrapnel from his head. He and his wife take a vacation for him to recuperate. Ross is distracted and annoyed by his fellow guests at the White Cliffs Hotel on the South Coast of England. When Mr. Griggs, a supposedly amusing and witty man, is found unresponsive in his room the maid jumps to the conclusion that he is dead. A doctor is called who find that Griggs has suffered some sort of respiratory attack and luckily can revive him. Ross later meets Griggs who at first seems friendly and of a like mind. When the other guests show up in the lounge Griggs' humor surfaces. He turns out to be a British Don Rickles belittling and insulting everyone with his brand of nasty humor. Ross seeing that nearly everyone is appalled or enraged by the insults begins to think that the health issue of the previous evening was really a murder attempt. Then Griggs suffers another respiratory attack and dies. Ross is convinced that the murderer struck again and this time he succeeded.

INNOVATIONS: The most intriguing aspect of Double Detection (1945) is that there are two detectives trying to solve the murder.  But each approached the crime from a different angle. Basically, it is the intuitive detective vs. the evidentiary detective. Noel Ross at first surmises and imagines an attempted murder and insists the accidental death Griggs suffers the second night is an actual murder. Inspector Cheviot Burmann shows up at the hotel and Ross ever eager to show his brilliant police work immediately assumes Burmann is there to investigate the murder. He's not. He is acting in an undercover role to ferret out a cook who is involved in a clothing coupon racket. But with his cover instantly blown by the rash ex-copper Burmann is forced to re-think hi strategy. So he begins to investigate as if Griggs was murdered. Slowly the coupon racket case and Ross imaginings blend and when the post-mortem comes out Burmann learns that Griggs was in fact poisoned. 

Ross approaches the crime focusing on HOW it was accomplished.  There is a complicated business with beer bottles recalling the mix-up of cocktail glasess in The Poisoner's Mistake. I was never really clear what was going on with these beer bottles until a very lengthy description which pointed out that some of the guests, including Griggs, had their own stock of beer. The reson for this also involves a complicated revelation about who o actually owned the hotel.

Burmann derided for ignoring the howdunit of the crime by Ross prefers to seek out the WHY. He spends much of his time finding a legitimate motive other than sheer hatred that Ross harps on about. The coupon racket scheme comes into play for a while and Burmann is keen that Griggs death has something to do with cheating his partners out of profits. much to his surprise this sound motive will fall apart when the real culprit behind the coupon is arrested and clears several of the suspects.  once again, Burmann will have to lean in on Ross' ideas in order to solve Grigg's murder.

SUMMARY: Intricately plotted, mostly fair play, and often very funny this was the second detective novel I've read by Belton Cobb and I thought it almost as ingenious as The Poisoner's Mistake. I say mostly fair play due one deeply hidden clue amounting to a bit of minutiae in one character's past that was mentioned exactly once. I thought that bit almost unfair but it was there in the story. Can't really whine. Also one crucial bit of information that seems practically superfluous shows up late in the novel and proves to have a lot to do with the murderer's motive. Therefore, nearly everything in this story will be relevant if the reader wants to match wits with Cobb and his detective characters. I nailed the murderer early in the story due to a psychological quirk that I have come across in other modern detective novels. This unusual aspect, a bonus of sorts to the murderer's motivation, might have come as a shock to Cobb's audience when the book was first published.

QUOTES:  That, of course, thought Cheviot as he put down the receiver, was the worst of doctors: they could always quote to you the case of someone who died in 1776 in a peculiar way and thus had prevented all people who had since died normally from establishing a firm rule. [...] Damn the doctors, thought Cneviot, they always make things harder instead of easier!

 Ross:  "What you need to do now is trace [the poison] from that bathroom to the kitchen where the beer was kept. When you've done that, you'll know who could have taken it there, and you'll have finished the case."

Burmann: "I suppose that would be one way to do it. But it has never been my way to do Sherlock Holmes stuff with a magnifying glass, crawling about carpets. And I don't believe that in this case it would work, if I did it."

EASY TO FIND? Though no modern reprints of this title exist Double Detection is easy to find in the used book market, especially from online sellers.  It was reprinted by Cherry Tree Books around the late 1940s or early 1950s. But be warned:  sometimes those Cherry Tree Books are abridged. I turned up 16 copies, a mix of hardcover and paperback, in one simple search and many come with the typographic DJ. All but two copies are priced sanely and affordably. Happy hunting!