Tragedy at the Unicorn (1928) by John Rhode

Tragedy at the Unicorn (1928) is only the fifth novel, of more than seventy, in the Dr. Lancelot Priestley series by "John Rhode," a pseudonym of John Street, which used to be one of his many out-of-print, hard to get and expensive titles to get a hold-of – until Spitfire Publishers reprinted it last year. Rhode's Tragedy at the Unicorn also used to be one of those rare, out-of-print impossible crime novels from a well-known mystery writer and the reason why it had been on my locked room wishlist for ages. So this is another obscure title that can be crossed off the list.

Tragedy at the Unicorn takes place in-and around the Unicorn Hotel in the seaport town of Clayport, "one of the best-known yachting centres on the south coast," which is run by Mrs. Burgess and her two daughters, Joan and Phyllis. Clayport is the home port of the Levity, a ketch, belonging to Bob Weldon, the skipper. Levity's crew comprises of Richard Gateman, Percy Hunter and the story's narrator, Mr. Attercliffe, who are all frequent guests at the Unicorn Hotel. But they're not the only guests who checked in on that late summer afternoon. There's Edward Motimer, a yachtsman, who owns a motor cruised named Dreamland, the detestable Dr. Victor Grinling and his valet, Ferguson. And, of course, it's the caustic Dr. Grinling who's going to end up causing trouble for everyone.

Next morning, Ferguson is unable to wake his master ("let sleeping Grinlings lie") and it takes a while before they can unlock the bedroom, but, when they finally go inside, they find Dr. Grinling lying "stone dead" in his bed. An empty syringe is found on the bedside table alongside a phial with small tablets of heroin ("one-sixth of a grain"). So remember the previous review in which I pointed out Helen McCloy's Dance of Death (1938) was written during a period when heroin was an over-the-counter drug? I couldn't have randomly picked a better book to make that point as Dr. Gringling was in the habit of taking "heroin injections for sleeplessness," remarking "he would have no difficulty obtaining the stuff" and "would know it would do him no harm" – "unless he took an overdose." If I were a publisher, I probably would have inserted a bunch of vintage ads for heroin cough drops and cocaine-laced "patent medicines" ("COCAINE TOOTHACHE DROPS, NOW WITH EVEN MORE COCAINE!"). That's not all.

A postmortem reveals had injected heroin, but what killed him was a second injection with morphia. Not the heroin. There were morphine tablets mixed with his heroin tablets, "all similar in appearance," which could make an accidental overdose, suicide or murder ("MRS. WINSLOW'S SOOTHING SYRUP FOR TEETHING CHILDREN, NOW WITH EVEN MORE MORPHINE!!"). Superintendent Collins is the first to take a crack at the case, but Dr. Priestley arrives right before the halfway mark to take charge of the investigation. This is, of course, one of Dr. Priestley's earlier cases and has yet to become the sedentary armchair oracle of later books. So the chapter following his arrival sees him all over the hotel to inspect and oil locks and hinges. Unfortunately, this proves to be short-lived as Tragedy at the Unicorn regrettably ended up being a flawed, undefined work of its time and an author who still has to find his footing in the genre.

The 1920s was a decade when the Golden Age detective story of the 1930s and '40s was taking shape and solidifying, which naturally came with some growing pains. Tragedy at the Unicorn goes from a promising, early Golden Age whodunit during the first-half to an uninspired, routine thriller in the second-half – involving a smuggling operation (of course). That's not a spoiler. It's patently obvious from the start smuggling is going on the background and it became the focal point of the second-half. Funnily enough, the smuggling operation is partly run by a Dutch gang peddling drugs between Clayport and Rotterdam, because why not ("THE NETHERLANDS, NOW WITH EVEN MORE CANNABIS!!!"). Dr. Priestley even translates a telegram in Dutch, even though his "knowledge of Dutch is not very extensive." Other than that, it has nothing noteworthy or anything particular to recommend. Just a smugglers doing what smugglers do.

So what about the murder of Dr. Grinling? The locked room setup looked promising: a solid door locked from the inside with the key still in the lock that "turns very stiffly." Only window was shut and fastened. The connecting door was locked with the key hanging on a board Joan's bedroom and blocked on both sides of the door by heavy washing stands. More than enough room to work out a halfway decent locked room-trick, but Rhode kept the locked room-trickery very rudimentary and very, very disappointing. Rhode at least tried to do something with the murderer's identity and motive, but the result is not exactly the stuff of classics. Both obvious and disappointing. So, simply as a detective novel or locked room mystery, Rhode's Tragedy at the Unicorn has nothing to offer or recommend. Unless you're a John Street completist or one of those nuts trying to go through every title Robert Adey listed in Locked Room Murders (1991). Rhode was much more successful with the impossible crime story in novels like Invisible Weapons (1938), Death in Harley Street (1946) and the "Miles Burton" novel Death in the Tunnel (1936). So I'll recommend them instead.

Note for the curious: why not end with a halfway decent solution, for 1928, to the locked room that occurred to me after the murder was discovered. What if Dr. Grinling told his killer to come to his room after he retired, but instructed the killer to come through the connecting door. Yes, the killer has a way to unlock the door. So they move aside the washstands, the killer unlocks the connecting door and enters to conduct their shady business. The killer is, of course, well aware of Dr. Grinling's habit to take a shot of heroin before going to sleep and brought along a syringe loaded with morphia. When the doctor was distracted, the killer swapped the heroin syringe for the morphia one. The killer left the room, locked the connecting door, washing stands returned to their original place and Dr. Grinling took his deadly injection in a perfectly locked room. This brilliant piece of armchair reasoning fell apart when it was shown he had taken both the heroin and morphia injections. At least I enjoyed cranking out this review.

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Murder, M.D. (1943) by Miles Burton

If you have read the 2023 post "The Hit List: Top 10 Fascinating World War II Detective Novels," you're probably aware of my fascination with detective fiction written, or taking place, during the Second World War – practically a subgenre at this point. There are even a few eerily prophetic mysteries, like Darwin L. Teilhet's The Talking Sparrow Murders (1934) and Theodore Roscoe's I'll Grind Their Bones (1936), but those written between 1939-45 remain the most fascinating. More than those prescient curiosities or the historical reconstructions. The WWII era detective story can easily fill a large, doubly stacked bookcase and half of them are still waiting to be rediscovered. So always keep an eye out for copies or reprints.

I don't recall who, when or where Murder, M.D. (1943) by "Miles Burton" was recommended to me as a noteworthy wartime village mystery. But whoever it was that recommended the book, thank you!

Miles Burton is one of the pseudonyms of the detective story's plot engineer, John Street, who's best known penname is "John Rhode" from his prolific Dr. Lancelot Priestley series. Street belongs to the once unfairly maligned, so-called "humdrum" school prioritizing plotting, particularly technical plots centering on murder methods, impossible crimes and unbreakable alibis, over characterization – appealing to puzzle fiends who want a tricky problem to pick apart. So even among us Golden Age detective fans, not everyone's a fan of Street's purely technical, plot-driven and cleverly contrived mysteries. Whatever its title might suggest, Murder, M.D. is a surprisingly Crime Queenish village mystery focusing more on the characters and storytelling than picking apart an ingeniously horrifying method for murder. The plot is still one of his best!

The backdrop of Murder, M.D. is the now sparsely populated village of Exton Forcett, "so many had left to serve in various capacities elsewhere," which also had to say goodbye to their popular village physician. When the war broke out, Dr. St. John Cecil joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and currently serves in the Middle East. Dr. Cecil arranged for Dr. Kurt Wiegler, a naturalized Austrian, to act as his locum, but the highly opinionated Dr. Wiegler is "constitutionally incapable of keeping his nose out of trouble and other people's affairs." Always threatening "to expose people" or "to inflict some unpleasantness upon them," openly stating he believes ninety percent of the villages suffer from "congenital idiocy" with the other ten percent being "deliberate criminals." So, despite being better than Dr. Cecil, his locum had made himself immensely unpopular as many villagers preferred to go the doctors in the neighboring villages.

Nobody is saddened when Dr. Wiegler's body is discovered on top of a boulder at the bottom of a gravel pit in Gallows Wood. Dr. Wiegler was a passionate birdwatcher and everyone at the scene guessed he had stumbled over the edge, while looking through his binoculars and plunged to his death. The coroner and jury at the inquest agreed with an accidental verdict.

Captain Desmond Merrion, one of the chiefs of the Naval Intelligence, is in the village on a short leave and confides to his host, Sir Mark Corringham, his believe Dr. Wiegler "was, in fact, deliberately murdered" – a fact deduced "on the evidence of a coat button and a couple of pine needles." However, they're more than happy to let sleeping dogs lie and life goes on the village as usual. Only notable things to happen over the following months, besides the war, are the arrivals of the surprising new locum and an unexpected, but very pleased, heir of the late locum. During this time, the new locum begins to suspect everyone in the village knew Dr. Wiegler had been killed, but nobody seemed interested in bringing his killer to justice. That sets up the second murder.

I think this second murder is one of the things distinguishing Murder, M.D. as a first-rate Golden Age detective story, because the second murder is not merely a plot-device to reignite interest during the second-half of the book. This second murder is unexpected and shocking with actual weight behind it. While the first murder was a relief to the village, the second murder is not nor is it going to be without consequences. Desmond Merrion is called back by Sir Mark to help out Inspector Arnold in weeding out the murderer. A problem requiring to timetable and map out everyone's movement, because the place where the body was found divides the suspects between the Cecils and the rest. Interestingly, they use blackout time to help piece together the victim's final steps ("however light it may be outside, the blackout has to go up at the time ordained"). So good, old-fashioned and solid detective work. But where Street really exceeded himself is the handling of the solution with a surprisingly well-hidden murderer.

Whether writing as John Rhode, Miles Burton or Cecil Waye, Street was always more interested in the how than who or why. So even in his best detective novels, the murderers and motives tend to be obvious (e.g. The Bloody Tower, 1938). Murder, M.D. is the opposite in what you would expect to the point that it almost seems deliberate. The story and plot has done away with what can be deemed his usual strengths to work and focus on what's generally considered to be greatest weaknesses: characterization, a well-hidden murderer and a good, not so obvious motive. Street delivered on the last two like he was Agatha Christie or Christianna Brand! Impressively, (SPOILER/ROT13) gur zheqrere fubhyq unir orra qbhoyl boivbhf, orpnhfr gung glcr bs punenpgre nyjnlf vaivgrf fhfcvpvba. Nal jevgre pnfgvat n punenpgre yvxr gung va gur ebyr bs zheqrere vf tvivat gurzfryirf n unaqvpnc (trg vg?) sebz gur fgneg. Vg jnfa'g fb boivbhf urer!

The finishing touch is the original, fairly clued motive complemented by Merrion's memorable exposure of the murderer cementing Murder, M.D. as a classic of the Golden Age village mystery and simply Street's very best detective novel read to date. Murder, M.D. deserves to be reprinted as it would be right at home in the British Library Crime Classic series. Until then, I recommend you pick up a copy, if one happens to come your way.

Murder at Monk's Barn (1931) by Cecil Waye

John Street was one of the more prolific mystery writers of the genre's heydays, producing nearly a 140 novels in two long-running series under two different pennames, "John Rhode" and "Miles Burton," but Tony Medawar discovered a third, previously unsuspected pseudonym, "Cecil Waye" – adding another four titles to his already impressive bibliography. Not that this revelation made copies any less scarce. 

Even during the current reprint renaissance, only a minuscule amount of Street's work has been reissued and honestly didn't expect the Cecil Waye novels to find their way back into print anytime soon. Dean Street Press decided differently and reprinted Murder at Monk's Barn (1931), The Figure of Eight (1931), The End of the Chase (1932) and The Prime Minister's Pencil (1933) back in February. Medawar provided these brand new editions with an informative introduction about this almost forgotten, short-lived series.

A noteworthy point of the Cecil Waye novels is that the detective duties are performed by a brother-and-sister team, Christopher and Vivienne Perrin, who Medawar described as private investigators in the tradition of the 1920s Young Adventurers – like Agatha Christie's Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. And, to my knowledge, there practically were no other sibling detectives during this period.

Anyway, three of the four novels are "metropolitan thrillers," but the first novel is a detective story "very much in the style of the John Rhode and Miles Burton books." What's more, the synopsis promised the unraveling of an impossible crime! There you have another title for that third, hypothetical supplement edition of Locked Room Murders. 

Murder at Monk's Barn opens on a cold, dark winter evening in the village of Fordington when Constable Burden returns to his cottage, but duty soon calls again as "a sharp report" brings him back out on the street. A parlor-maid comes running out of Monk's Barn yelling that the master's been shot in his dressing room. Upstairs, the constable finds the body of Gilbert Wynter, an electrical engineer, slumped in front of the dressing-table with a shaving mirror on it and "a bullet wound in the centre of his forehead." Someone had fired a shot from the garden through the window, which requires an "amazing accuracy of aim," but more on that angle in a moment.

The public opinion and local police, represented by Superintendent Swayne, have their sights on Wynter's second gardener, Walter Mintern, who was sacked on the Saturday before the murder. Walter took it very badly and loudly threatened in the public-house "he would get his own back," but Gilbert's younger brother and business partner, Austin, suspects "the whole damn gang" at Fordington of "a damned low-down plot" without exactly knowing why – determining him to find out who killed his brother. So he turns to two private investigators, Christopher and Vivienne Perrin, who have a knotty tangle to unsnarl.

One of the knots is that the murder is something of an impossibility. How did the murderer enter the garden, fired a shot from the shrubbery and escaped unseen with Constable Burden standing in the street within seconds of the shot being heard? How did the murderer knew where to aim? The shot was fired through a closed window with the thick, heavy curtains closely drawn and the bullet had left a small hole in it. So how could the murderer have shot Gilbert? You can't see "a shadow doesn't show through a thick curtain" much less "hit it with a rifle bullet."

You can always rely on Rhode to come up with a nifty trick, or gimmick, good enough to carry the plot and sustain the story, which is a bare necessity with Rhode as his murderers tend to be easily spotted. Murder at Monk's Barn is no exception to the rule. The murderer here is not difficult to find and a second murder removed any doubt, but, once again, you can rely on Rhode to make a second murder as distinctly interesting as the first murder. This time, Rhode used the second murder to show the reader how a plot-technician handles a box of poisoned chocolates and made a good attempt along the way to misdirect readers who had already caught on to the murderer's identity.

So the entire plot rests on how these murders were committed and they were designed to hold it up, but it should be noted that despite the strong how-was-it-done element, it's not a humdrum affair at all – much more lively than your average Rhode or Burton novel. You can ascribe that to having two 1920s-style Bright Young Things as detectives and they added another complication to the case. Austin and Vivienne began to fall in love the moment the police directed their attention at Austin's beautiful motive, ample opportunity and a non-existent alibi, which made her rush towards the solution ahead of her brother. She pieces together the solution from physical clues (e.g. pottery shards) helped by her understanding of human nature. A very well done combination of the intuitionists and realists approach and one of the many details that made this such a rich and rewarding read.

In many ways, Murder at Monk's Barn is a typical Dr. Priestley or Desmond Merrion novel with the how being more important than who-and why, but the detective-characters make all the difference here in both presentation and storytelling. So even with all the familiar touches and usual craftsmanship, Murder at Monk's Barn has something new to offer to readers already familiar with Rhode, but readers who'll be getting their first taste of Rhode can get an idea what to expect (plot-wise) from his other series. If you like what you read, I recommend you track down copies of The Bloody Tower (1938) and Invisible Weapons (1938).

A Barrel Full of Red Herrings

"A quarrel is like buttermilk: once it's out of the churn, the more you shake it, the more sour it grows."

- proverb 

On the tail of my review of Death in the Tunnel (1936), the Puzzle Doctor announced his embarkation on a month-long Rhode-a-Thon and Vintage Pop Fictions posted an enticing review of Death at Low Tide (1938), which managed to immediately lure me back to the works of John Street – who penned over a hundred of plot-driven mystery novels as "John Rhode," "Miles Burton" and "Cecil Waye." Initially, I wanted to read one of his Dr. Lancelot Priestley novels, but ended up settling for the book that preceded Death in the Tunnel.

The Milk-Churn Murder (1935), alternatively known as The Clue of the Silver Brush, began very promising as the opening chapter painted a charming picture of rural dairy farming in "the small hamlet of Tolsham." A place called Starvesparrow Farm, owned and run by the short-tempered Mr. Hollybud, is used an example to illustrate how the milk is transported from the local farms to the dairies for processing.

But one day, the working routine is broken by a sensational and gruesome discovery that "set the police a problem which at one time it seemed they would never solve."

The break in routine came when a lorry-driver from the dairy picked up an extra, unaccountable milk-churn from Mr. Hollybud's farm and at first glance the content seems to be pig-wash, but the "curious liquid" turns out to be something more disgusting than simple pig-wash – a pottage of milk, water, formalin and the dismembered body parts of a man. Only the head was missing! There were also an assortment of particulars found in the churn: a sharpened, ivory-handled carving-knife, an old leather wallet, horn-rimmed spectacles without lenses, a railway guide and a key to a hotel room, which were wrapped inside a blood-stained flannel vest. Some of these items also had initials scrawled on them, namely "A.L.S."

Chief Constable of Wessex immediately put in a call for assistance to Scotland Yard and that same afternoon Inspector Arnold from the Criminal Investigation Department arrived in the vicinity, but there's barely a chapter between his primarily investigation and him sending an invitation to his friend, Desmond Merrion – who has made a name for himself as an amateur detective. Here's where the story slowly began to sour for me.

Merrion comes to the conclusion that "the murderer is a pretty cunning bloke," but is also "one of those people who can't resist the temptation to gild the lily" and seems to be very "fond of red herrings," which he seems to have dragged across every trail they uncovered.

However, the first problem is that Merrion seems a bit too omniscient when it comes to separating the manufactured pieces of evidence from the real ones. Or when correctly guessed there might have been as second person who left bread crumbs for the police to find. It also makes you wonder why the murderer did not simply drove the innocently looking milk-churn to a quiet, remote and rarely frequented spot in the English countryside and simply buried it, but that would have been entirely forgivable as the investigate parts of the story were not bad – which seems to be the best parts of the Miles Burton books.  

What I have a problem with is that the murderer turned out to be an unknown element in the story and only made an appearance when this person was identified, but the story did not end there. Unmercifully, the plot began to drag itself out and two additional bodies failed to sustain or renew my interest in the story. One of the murders was suppose to make it very personal for one of the detectives, but the personal note of the second murder was not done very convincing and the final murder, presented as a suicide, was very frustrating – because it stretched the story out over another chapter. Even the inspector eventually remarked that he was "sick to death of this infernal case."

Considering the renewed interest in Rhode/Burton, I really wish I had a better story to report back on, but this is what I found and it simply was not that good. I might take down a third Rhode/Burton title later this month and hope it'll even out this negative review, but The Milk-Churn Murder is a title that can only really be recommended to completists.

Hopefully, I'll have something better for my next blog-post.

Devilish Conspiracy

"The affair attracted enormous attention at the time, not only because of the arresting nature of the events, but even more for the absolute mystery in which they were shrouded."

- Freeman Wills Crofts' "The Mystery of the Sleeping Car-Express" (1921), collected in The Mystery of the Sleeping Car-Express and Other Stories (1956)

I have covered John Street, or "John Rhode," before on this blog, but not as often as I would have liked to.

Rhode had a technical mind and he could be described as a mechanic of detective fiction who engineered and constructed over a hundred tricky plots, which was not necessarily restricted to his own body of work – as he was credited by John Dickson Carr as the co-author of Fatal Descent (1939) for his relatively small, but very technical, contribution to the plot. But his reputation as a wholesaler of clever and ingenious contrived plots is best illustrated in an anecdote from Christianna Brand. She once suffered from a pesky case of writer's block and Rhode kindly offered the then young novelist to come down to his place, examine his bookshelves and help herself to one of his plots. Assuring her that she was "most welcome" to do so. What a gentleman!

Evidently, Rhode was a man who knew his way around a plot and his output was probably the closest you could get to an emporium of nefarious schemes, devilish plots and cleverly fabricated puzzles, but they tended to be technical in nature – which earned him an undeserved reputation in the post-World War II landscape of the genre as a boring, sleep inducing writer. You only have to read such titles as The House on Tollard Ridge (1929), Death on the Board (1937) and Men Die at Cyprus Lodge (1943) to know how wrong the detractors of the so-called humdrum writers were about Rhode. He was first and foremost a plotter, which meant characterization often took a backseat in favor of the plot.

One of the negative side effects of being reputedly dull was Rhode's name sliding into obscurity and a large swath of his work became rare or fairly hard to get, which naturally meant prize-tags with double, triple or even quadruple digits scrawled on them – effectively keeping them out of the hands of ordinary readers. So I have been carefully rationing the small stack of his books acquired over the years, but, recently, they appear to have reached the front of the line of Golden Age mysteries that were waiting to be reprinted. That brings us to the subject of today's review.

Death in the Tunnel (1936) originally appeared under Rhode's second byline, "Miles Burton," which has recently been republished by the Poisoned Pen Press as a British Library Crime Classic and is prefaced with an excellent introduction by Martin Edwards – who recently swooped up an Edgar statuette for The Golden Age of Murder (2015).

Sir Wilfred Saxonby is the president of an import company, Wigland & Bunthorne Ltd, who serves his community as the chairman of the local Bench of magistrates, but he "was a man of temperate" and "frugal habits." As a magistrate, his philosophy was that "the law was an excellent thing" and considered himself "a firm supporter of it," but it was made for a different class of people and did not always felt bound by it himself – which did not prevent him from being reluctant "to temper justice with mercy" when acting in the capacity of magistrate. So not exactly "the sort of character who inspires affection."

There seems to have been something very irregular on Sir Wilfred's mind when he boarded the train from London's Cannon Street to his home in Stourford for the very last time. He pressed a one-pound note in the hands of the train guard, Mr. Turner, to find him a first-class carriage to himself, which he was able to do and locked him into the compartment. Sir Wilfred is left to his own devices, but when Turner returns to the supposedly secure and impromptu private-compartment he discovers the body of his once generous passenger. Shot through the heart!

Inspector Arnold of Scotland Yard is assigned to the case and the problem confronting him is rife with contradictory evidence. The death of Sir Wilfred is either a case of suicide or murder. There are some points in favor of the former: a small, automatic pistol engraved with his initials is found near the body, the request for private carriage that was locked and he sent his children abroad – which could have been done to make sure that they would not be suspected if the authorities mistook his death for a murder. Only problem is that he lacked a clear and conceivable motive for taking his own life. Business was thriving and he was opposed to the idea of suicide, but the presence of a mysterious murderer seems, literarily, an impossibility.

So Arnold turns to his good friend, Desmond Merrion, who's "something of an amateur criminologist" and even he remarks how "there is at least as much evidence in support of the theory of suicide as there is against it," which makes for an engrossing and meticulous investigation – as they sift through the evidence and hypothesize about the various clues. The best part of their investigation is figuring out what exactly happened when the train went into the titular tunnel on that fateful journey. A situation that forms the meat of the impossible situation of the plot.

When the train entered the Blackdown Tunnel, the driver claims to have been "held up by a man waving a red lamp," assuming it was simply someone working on the line, and "clapped on the brakes," but then the light changed to green and the train rattled on without losing too much time. There is, however, one peculiarity about this seemingly unimportant incident: nobody was reported or scheduled to work in the tunnel at the time and "some unauthorized person" could not have entered the tunnel, because at each end there's a signal cabin and "nobody could possibly get in without being seen by the men on duty."

My favorite part of the book is probably the exploration of the tunnel as trains murderously roared past them and more than once they had to crawl into one of refuges in the wall for safety. Arnold and Merrion are well rewarded for braving these dangers, because they discover some important pieces of evidence, such as shattered fragments of glass, which seem to indicate Sir Wilfed was the victim of a vast, strange and sinister conspiracy. But even better is the explanation they work out for entering and leaving a sealed and watched train tunnel, which does not hinge upon a spare uniform from a railway worker.

The method is very involved and perhaps a bit too clever for its own good, but you have to admire Rhode for finding a hidden Judas window inside a train tunnel!

Anyway, Death in the Tunnel concerns itself almost entirely with the reconstruction of the shooting and the particulars found on the body, which is both a major strength and weakness of the book. If you love pure, unadulterated detective work this book is for you, but, as a consequence, even I found the characters to be cardboard-like. I can usually forgive shallow characterization, if the plot is good, but even I can't deny the characters here where nothing more than chessmen. Death in the Tunnel is also primarily a how-dun-it and this came at the cost of the who and why, which is what bars the book from a place in the top ranks of the genre because the plot-thread explaining the motivation for this admittedly devilish ingenious conspiracy was introduced in the final part of the story.

I believe that could've been handled a bit better by a professional plotter, which Rhode was, but, if you read the book purely as a how dun it, they become fairly minor complaints. Above all, it's simply a lot of old-fashioned fun to read how Arnold and Merrion take apart the mechanics of a very tricky criminal conspiracy. It makes for an engaging and involved reading experience.  

Finally, Death in the Tunnel also made me want to read more from the so-called school of humdrum detectives, which even include writers I have not even touched yet! Scandalous, I know. How dare I label myself as rabid and fanatical when it comes to vintage mysteries, but give me some time. I'll get there and, in the mean time, you can look forward to more of these reviews. Oh, you lucky, you!