The Layton Court Mystery
(1925)
My review:
This
remarkably
rare novel, published anonymously, was
Sheringham is, at this stage, very voluble and somewhat fallible, although more acute than he was later to be. Sheringham and his Watson, Alec Grierson, are both well-developed characters—the only ones in the book, as the rest of the characters, consisting of the suspicious possible conspirators who could have stepped out of an Innes novel, exist only on the periphery. Everyone except the melodramatically unpleasant blackmailer, Victor Stanworth, an apparent suicide in a locked room, act from noble reasons. The solution is clever, but the story-telling is very poor. As mentioned above, the only two characters in the book are Roger and Alec, who spend their entire time examining and finding clues: Roger deduces murder from a broken vase shard, and investigates footprints. Despite these and other clues, the reader is never able at any point to hazard a guess to the killer’s identity—no-one, and everyone, is suspicious. Happily, this would improve in later books.
The author’s first novel, published anonymously, and more inspired by Bentley and Milne’s old school reliance on the simplest of situations and characters than later books; hence, an unusual and atypical beginning. Characterisation and narrative drive are both inferior to late tales; instead there is a lot of chit-chat between the maddeningly entertaining Sheringham (an ancestor of Gervase Fen’s?) and Alec Grierson, who, in the virtual absence of other characters, carry the tale. This is amateur detection at its most amateur, but also at its best: two friends doing it for the sport of the thing, with abundant energy and enthusiasm compensating for the slow pace. The solution is quite surprising, anticipating as it does The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.