George Douglas Howard and Margaret Cole are a husband and wife team who are probably better known in their academic fields. Douglas (as he preferred to be called, pointed out to me by Curt Evans) was a well known journalist and economist with numerous books in the field still read today while his wife was a classics instructor at a girls' school and later a socialist politician. In their early writing careers they teamed up to write several detective novels and created the popular policeman sleuth Superintendent Wilson. The Wilson books are characterized by satiric humor, sharply defined characters, deftly rendered settings and - for the most part - scrupulous attention to the fair play techniques in plotting. One of their best efforts is
Dead Man's Watch.
A drowned man washes up on the banks of a creek in the village of Studleigh Pepperton in Devon. He is discovered by Ronald Bittaford who happens to be passing through the town with his girlfriend, Dorothy. To his shock he notices that the man is his uncle Percy, a relative Ron claims he has not been in contact with for years. Later, other people will step forward to identify the body as Percy's brother Harold, recently arrived from Australia. The problem of the identity of the corpse leads to much confusion among the inept local police and infuriates Sir Charles Wylie, a local baronet and J.P., on whose land the creek flows. He is indignant that the police refuse to see some rather obvious signs that the corpse is most likely a murder victim. In addition to some complicated issues dealing with the tides there is the fact that the corpse has been shaven after death and one witness identifying the body notes that a valuable watch is missing from the personal effects of the body.
The book is divided into three sections. Wilson appears in the first and last sections while the second is devoted mostly to the detective work of Sir Charles Wylie and his reluctant sleuthing partner Dorothy Daniells, Ron's girl friend, who takes to her job with gusto once she settles upon it. Wylie convinces her to spy on the locals in the town where Percy Bittaford was living with his wife. He asks her to write daily reports to him in letters and he will reply in kind with his follow-up detective work. Dorothy's letters are fine examples of the Coles' skill in capturing the language and world view of working class girl in pre-World War 2 era England. They are rambling, chatty, gossip-filled missives that also cleverly manage to contain some of the most important clues to the solution of the many mysteries surrounding the death of the drowned man. This kind of burying of clues reminded me the way Christianna Brand manages to plant her clues in the garrulous chit-chat among the dialog exchanges of her finely drawn characters.
What really grabbed my attention in this quick paced story are the varied cast of characters. From the reporter who inveigles his way into the crime scene and gets his big scoop passing himself off as a police aide to the oddball residents in Marine View, a boarding house right out of an Ealing Studio comedy, every person in this densely populated detective novel has their moment to shine. In addition to Sir Charles and Dorothy (a better and more likeable amateur sleuth pair may not exist in the genre) I liked the unctuous Mr. Fishcote, a landlord who manipulates Sir Charles into buying him drinks and expects a little cash for his dirt on the Bittaford brothers; and also Mrs. Devene, described as a "grass widow," who while waiting for her husband to return from his military duties in India likes to entertain gentlemen privately in her Marine View bedroom under the pretense of having tea. Sir Charles risks embarrassment and marring his reputation by accepting her offer to "go upstairs" so he can ply her for much needed information about the Bittafords.
Reading this book was a welcome surprise to me. A delightful book it is filled with biting humor and multiple puzzling mysteries. Skillful, entertaining, often very funny with a cleverly constructed mystery
Dead Man's Watch is one of those rare examples from the Golden Age -- a old book that reads like a contemporary novel. Even with the few period references it holds up well mostly due to the characters' all too human behavior which is the primary focus of the story.
Such a shame that the Coles have been out of print for decades. I highly recommend this book to determined book hounds and devotees of traditional detective fiction; it's well worth reading if you can find a copy. And I would also strongly hint to independent publishers that if ever a detective novel was deserving of a reissue this is definitely it. I plan to review more of the Coles' mystery novels I have managed to acquire over the years. A bigger and unsolved mystery is why I have waited so long to read them.
We travel all over the magic in mystery spectrum with a somewhat chronological exploration starting with some pulp stories from the very early days of that business and my discovery that Charles Fulton Oursler (aka Anthony Abbot) had been writing weird mysteries, many with magician detectives, between 1919 and 1929. Ken Crossen and Bruce Elliott turn up, we segue into talk of seances, mediums and the fraudulent spiritualists of the early 20th century a topic that popped up in many novels of the era. The rarely mentioned, quite forgotten, American mystery writer Henry Kitchell Webster makes a long overdue appearance when I discuss his excellent crime novel The Ghost Girl and the talk of seances and mediums in books gives way to TV shows and movies that feature either magicians or seances.
