A review of The Arsenal Stadium Mystery by Leonard Gribble – 240423
There is a long history of media tie ups with football clubs which often do not end up as the parties had anticipated. Leonard Gribble’s The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, originally published in 1939 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, is an early example of such enterprises and was also made into a film in the same year, cashing in on the popularity of Arsenal Football Club, one of the leading clubs at the time. Interestingly, it features as some of its characters members of the then Arsenal team, household names then although only familiar now to those ardent students of the game. There is even a page devoted to facsimiles of the players’ autographs at the start of the book.
The set up is a game between Arsenal and the leading amateur team, the Trojans. Disaster strikes when the newest member of the Trojan team, John Doyce, after receiving a parcel at half time, collapses on the field, sadly not so unusual an occurrence these days but a rarity then, and dies shortly afterwards in the treatment room. No one was near him at the time he collapsed and it is soon established that he was the victim of foul play, having been killed, to quote the book, “by a little prick” coated with poison.
The police team, led by Inspector Slade and assisted by Sergeant Clinton, and with the assistance of the respective team managers, George Allison of Arsenal, he was the real manager at the time, and Francis Kindilett of the Trojans, tries to get to grips with the mystery and bring the culprit to justice. Strip away the footballing milieu and it is quite a conventional murder mystery, with the usual stock of herrings, perhaps dressed in red and white, secrets from the past, and revenge.
The victim, Doyce, is a philandered and an insurance broker by trade, often the two go hand in hand in my experience, and has recently fallen out with his business partner, Morring, who stands to gain £10,000 from an insurance policy on his partner’s death, over a girl. Morring was overheard threatening Doyce and there is enough circumstantial evidence to put a noose around Morring’s neck, his case not being helped by the vindictiveness of his former fiancée, Pat Laruce.
However, Slade is not convinced. Why was Kindilett so reluctant to have Doyce in the team and why was there a press clipping in the fatal parcel delivered to Doyce at the stadium referring to the apparent suicide four years earlier of Kindilett’s daughter? It was sufficiently traumatic to cause Kindilett to leave Ryechester and abandon his previous amateur project, the Saxons. Is there a link between the tragic events in Ryechester and the philandering Doyce?
Slade is an engaging sleuth, diligent, striking up a good rapport with Allison, and with a good sense of psychology and theatrics, gathering the Trojan squad together and making them show their hands, having banked that one of their number would have taken the opportunity presented by the unsealing of the treatment room to retrieve the murder weapon and get a tell-tale dye stain on their fingers. Of course, it worked a treat.
I was not surprised by the identity of the culprit as there were only three credible suspects and my money is always on the outsider. Slade does seem prone to wild leaps of faith but his intuition, naturally, wins out.
It is not necessarily a book for the football fan. The game just happens to be the setting that Gribble has chosen but for those nostalgic for the game of old there are plenty of opportunities to wander down memory lane. The teams are produced in the old programme format, the crowd surges forward and backwards as the action on the pitch unfolds, there is a brass band for entertainment, a feature that was still part of the Arsenal pre-match entertainment when I first visited Highbury in the 1970s, and the crowd slowly dispersing anxious to learn the other results and to check their pools coupons. There was no television showroom or chap with a transistor radio to crowd around in those days, just a wait for the sporting edition of the local newspapers.
There is much to appreciate in the book although, as a murder mystery, it is more of a regulation home win than a classic encounter.
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