A review of The Lake District Murder by John Bude – 240508
Originally published in 1935 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, this is the first in John Bude’s George Meredith series. It is a book planted firmly in Freeman Wills Crofts territory, an exhaustive and exhausting police procedural in which the series detective grapples with a mystery which has two strands to it but leading to the same portal.
The book, set in the wilds of a Lake District far removed from the usual tourist haunts, begins promisingly enough with the discovery of the body of a garage owner, sitting in his car and asphyxiated by carbon monoxide fumes from the exhaust of the running motor. It looks like suicide, but, of course, with a little digging it proves to be murder as the victim had no reason to kill himself, being about to get married and emigrate to Canada.
In investigating the circumstances surrounding Clayton’s death, Meredith’s attention is drawn to the movements of a petrol tanker whose route takes in remote garages in the coastal area of Whitehaven, Workington, and Maryport. It seems to be delivering more petrol than the capacity of the tanker. Is there some kind of scam and, if so, what is it, who is it behind it, and does it have any bearing on Clayton’s death and the apparent suicide of another remote garage owner three years earlier?
Much of the book is taken up with pondering over the minutiae of the scam with a ludicrously man and time-consuming exercise of police officers hiding surreptitiously to time how long the tanker takes to unload its order at each of the garages over a number of days, the information about the route and quantities conveniently provided by a helpful informant in the petrol company’s yard. Sadly for Meredith, he has got the wrong end of the stick. The fraud is not about petrol but an even more valuable commodity and ties in nicely with the other business interests of the eminence grise.
Once Meredith gets on the right track, he unravels an ingenious plot involving secret passages, hidden pipes and chambers and Coffey stills. It is well-worked out and the reader gets the sense that it had a fair chance of success even today. Having got enough evidence to contemplate a mass arrest with raids on various garages and public houses, Meredith suddenly realizes that he has not closed the murder case. There is very little of a whodunit about it as the culprits are known from an early stage and the focus is on establishing enough evidence to satisfy a jury. It is no surprise that the plot and murder are connected, a connection which explains why Conway had to be murdered.
We get there in the end and there are no loose ends to a tidily told story but, rather like the Lake District itself, it takes a long time to get there, even if the result is worthwhile. There are some fascinating insights along the way, a landlady clearly nonplussed by the sight of a new-fangled zip fastener and Meredith zipping along the countryside in a combination, a motorbike with sidecar.
Meredith is a diligent detective who is happy to take direction from his superiors and often requires steers from them to get his enquiries back on track. Although he rightly gets the plaudits for unravelling a sophisticated racket and solving a murder and a well deserved promotion to Superintendent, his boss, Thompson, also played a major part and his reconstructions of what happened are spot on. An amusing aspect of Meredith’s character is that he always seems to jump up with a start when a new idea or lead strikes him and is forever castigating himself when he gets, as he often does, the wrong end of the stick.
Bude’s stories get better as he matures as a writer. We all have to start somewhere, I suppose.
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