The title is a gloss on an estate agent’s marketing phrase, which is fitting as this story begins in a realtor’s office. Mr. Simeon Apperley enters, concerned to learn that his secretary, Brinklow, has not visited the agent as expected and is now missing, along with Mr. Apperley’s automobile and some cases containing valuable postage stamps from his collection. Man, vehicle, and stamps are soon found, with Brinklow dead in the car parked outside Ash House, a property that had already acquired a slightly shadowy reputation. The victim had received a fatal blow from an iron plate, potentially dropped through the car’s open rooftop from a house window. While Brinklow was familiar with the town of Wraynesford from years past, motive for the man’s death is obscure, especially as the stamps were not taken from the car.
Inspector Arnold of Scotland Yard is called in to assist local constable Prickett, and suspicion quickly settles on Isaac Napley, the leader of a group of itinerant gypsies. The uneducated laborer may have not recognized the value within the cases and Brinklow’s murder may have been merely a crime of opportunity. But then a second death occurs, with Apperley’s cousin involved in a fatal motor accident on the road leading to Ash House, and Arnold wonders if this is more than a coincidence. He eventually untangles the events, but he might have gotten there much sooner had he consulted his friend Desmond Merrion; this book is Merrion-free, and the reader is also likely ahead of the detective regarding the solution.
Over at Nick Fuller’s great GAD website, The Grandest Game in the World, Nick calls Residence “the most tedious Burton I’ve read so far” and complains, with justification, that “the solution is obvious by the end of Chapter 3.” I wouldn’t describe this book as tedious; it reminds me just how consistent Cecil John Charles Street is as a writer. His plotlines and prose never really mystify or dazzle (at least they don’t for me), but they are usually modestly engaging and keep the investigation reliably moving forward. (There is certainly no inner monologuing or overdescription of setting that other mystery writers might indulge in, and that is modestly admirable.) The criticism of the puzzle being over-obvious is a fair one, and it is not exclusive to this Rhode/Burton title; if the reader has figured out the details, then we are waiting for the author to have his detective catch up, hence the tedium.
Over at Nick Fuller’s great GAD website, The Grandest Game in the World, Nick calls Residence “the most tedious Burton I’ve read so far” and complains, with justification, that “the solution is obvious by the end of Chapter 3.” I wouldn’t describe this book as tedious; it reminds me just how consistent Cecil John Charles Street is as a writer. His plotlines and prose never really mystify or dazzle (at least they don’t for me), but they are usually modestly engaging and keep the investigation reliably moving forward. (There is certainly no inner monologuing or overdescription of setting that other mystery writers might indulge in, and that is modestly admirable.) The criticism of the puzzle being over-obvious is a fair one, and it is not exclusive to this Rhode/Burton title; if the reader has figured out the details, then we are waiting for the author to have his detective catch up, hence the tedium.
I found a few items of interest at this Residence, including the author’s casual references to British wartime circumstances: meat is a scarce commodity, impacting Arnold’s beloved pub lunches; there are few young men around in the village other than Isaac Napley, the gypsy suspect. And it’s sociologically intriguing to hear Arnold and Prickett (via the author) assess the nomadic family, a group that can’t be trusted because it has an almost genetically criminal ethos. Prickett lists littering, disturbing the peace, and avoiding the police among the Napleys’ offenses; paradoxically, they are also the book’s only example of hardworking (and apparently honest and reliable) manual laborers. You can contrast this suspicion-of-the-outsider perspective with Gladys Mitchell’s more anthropological interest in rural gypsy customs in books like Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose (1956).
This Undesirable Residence was published in the U.S. as Death at Ash House (Doubleday, Doran & Co., also 1942). I am grateful for a robust academic interlibrary loan system that lets me sample these desirable properties in a market that would otherwise be well out of my price range.
This Undesirable Residence was published in the U.S. as Death at Ash House (Doubleday, Doran & Co., also 1942). I am grateful for a robust academic interlibrary loan system that lets me sample these desirable properties in a market that would otherwise be well out of my price range.
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