The Devil's Elbow (1951)

1951 Michael Joseph blurb:

<>Dan Jeffries's job, as courier on a coach taking holiday-makers on a tour of Scotland, was fairly uneventful until, with the tour nearly over, one of the party was murdered.  It was fortunate that the important facts preceding the crime had been faithfully recorded by Jeffries in letters to his fiancĂ©e, and even more fortunate that she should have been working for Mrs. Bradley.

Mrs. Bradley, as befits "the best woman detective in fiction", was quickly on the scene, questioning and deducing, ferreting out the real facts behind this apparently motiveless crime.  There was the question of the boat-trip undertaken by some members of the coach party, the nylons found in a caravan mattress, the jewels smuggled in a barrel of fish, and other seemingly irrelevant discoveries.  But relevant they were, and Mrs. Bradley was soon well on the way to solving one of her most brilliant cases.

The Devil's Elbow will delight all lovers of a good detective story, and particularly the many admirers of Mrs. Adela Lestrange Bradley.

My review:

A work that is more entertaining the second time round, largely because the reader is expecting less, and so is pleasurably surprised when he finds a fairly sensible, straightforward detective story, with more alibi-checking and interviewing than imagination or flights of fancy, let down only by a rather weak finish, as the culprit turns out to be a character we know little about (although her diary and Mrs. Bradley's comments on it serve as foreshadowing).  The Scottish coach tour setting is original, but the narrator / courier is, like so many of Mitchell's young men, first cousin to Bertie Wooster (but not to a upas tree), and the humour is often facetious and heavy-handed.

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