Murder Jigsaw

A review of Murder Jigsaw by Edwin and Mona Radford – 251115

Fishing is a pastime that I have never taken to never having the patience to sit quietly on a riverbank pitting my wits against an innocent creature going about its business but I do appreciate the skill, particularly of the fly fisherman and I know enough to realise that an ardent sportsman would be circumspect in the way that they laid down their rod and that dry fly fishing and wet fly fishing never mix.

Doctor Harry Manson, the Yard’s eminent forensic scientist, is a dry fly fisherman and considers that the way Colonel Donoughmore, a fellow dry fly practitioner, had laid down his rod and had a wet fly attached to the line are too curious to pass off as coincidence or carelessness. In another case of a busman’s holiday, Eric and Mona Radford’s second book in their Manson series, originally published in 1944 and reissued by Dean Street Press, takes the sleuth on a holiday to the Cornish fishing hotel, the Trewarden Arms, famed for its nearby rivers teeming with abundant supplies of trout and salmon.

Any hopes that Manson may have had of a few days’ sport are quickly dashed when the Colonel’s body is found drowned in a nearby salmon pool. The local police are quick to dismiss the death as an unfortunate accident, but there are little clues including fragments of green weed in the dead man’s lungs and stomach and the pure coincidence of him falling into the water at the only open part of the river together with the position of the rod and the fly suggest otherwise. Caught hook, line and sinker Manson is forced to lead the investigation and quickly summons his sidekick and fellow scientist, Merry, to assist.

Inevitably, the Colonel turns out to be a deeply unpleasant character, a share pusher duping rich fools into investing in non-existent companies, a womanizer with more than an eye for the local talent, and not averse to a spot of blackmail when the opportunity presents itself. A couple of his fellow guests at the hotel who were on the riverbank at the time of his death had publicly uttered threats against him, while Major Smithers had been wiped out by an unwise investment Donoughmore had introduced him to, while Sir Edward Maurice had also been duped but not to so catastrophic effect.

And then there is Janice Devereux, about to marry a wealthy man, who had lost her first husband out in India when he was serving in the same district as Donoughmore. They must have met but why did they ignore each other at the hotel and why was Donoughmore so suddenly interested in the circumstances of Devereux’s death and what hold does he have over her? There is enough bait swirling in the tempestuous eddies of the Trewarden Arms to tempt a murderer, but who?

A Manson story is an Austin Freeman-lite, detailed enough in its description of investigative methodology to give it a sense of realism but not too heavy to swamp and discourage the reader anxious to know whodunit. Manson’s Box of Tricks comes into play, allowing him to take a more detailed analysis of the body than the local man, particularly to isolate some intriguing clues that cast doubt on the locus of the murder. He is also painstaking, spending a couple of hours painstakingly piecing together fragments of spectacle lenses and also incredibly fortunate, stumbling upon a cigarette butt which enables him to crack a seemingly watertight alibi. Never one to play down his scientific training, Mason even casts the solution to the mystery in the form of three algebraic formulae.

His conclusion is that something happened on July 15^th to bring matters to a head and an investigation of the hotel register helps to put the pieces of the jigsaw together. In a nice touch Manson allows the culprit to travel to Exeter before they are arrested, this sparing his beloved Trewarden Arms from the ignominy of having an arrest on its premises. The Colonel was triply unfortunate on the day of his death, adding complexity to an ingenious plot, and there is some irony in that he was assaulted by his own priest.

As is their wont, the Mansons helpfully point out in intermissions some points that the reader might want to consider if they are playing the armchair sleuth but these pointers disappear as the plot reaches its resolution. There are clues and heavy hints enough if the reader is diligent enough to spot them.

The book must have made the contemporary reader long for the idyllic lazy summer days of peacetime. These forensic novels are not everyone’s plate of fish and chips but I felt that there was enough mix of scientific acumen and genuine mystery to make the book a satisfying read.