A review of Eight to Nine by R A J Walling – 240321
The curiously titled sixth novel in Robert Walling’s Philip Tolefree series, also known as The Bachelor Flat Mystery, originally published in 1934, is another story where the movements of suspects at a particular time hold the keys to the mystery. The hour in question is between eight and nine, when housekeeper Mrs Pilling is off duty at Elford Mansions, hence the title, and seasoned readers of the detective fiction genre will soon realise that the empirical evidence of time is not necessarily to be trusted.
The story also centres around a femme fatale, an actress by the name of Millicent Vane, a woman with a past and to whom several rich and eligible bachelors are attracted like bees to a honeypot. One such is Bill Chance, son of Lord Greenwood, and the worried nobleman engages Tolefree, insurance broker and amateur sleuth, to dig around and find if there is any scandal attached to the woman. Curiously, we never meet Miss vane. Despite his distaste for the task, Tolefree accepts the brief and accompanied by his faithful Watson, a ship broker by the name of Farrar, begins his investigations.
Acting on a hunch to visit rich playboy, Howard Klick, at Elworth mansions, Tolefree finds that the comedic Mrs Pilling has fainted and that there is a body of a murdered man in the flat occupied by North. Despite the assumption that the murdered man is North, Tolefree discovers, courtesy of a feather and an Australian penny, that the victim is Australian and that he is Pendleton, the husband of Miss Vane whom, when he was imprisoned for fraud down under, she left to come to England and seek her fame and fortune. Understandably, Pendleton was a bit miffed and when he was released sought his revenge.
The police investigation is led by Pierce and while he and Tolefree have perfectly amiable relations, they approach the case from radically different angles, coming up with two different culprits. Tolefree engages in a masterful piece of filibustering to prevent Pierce making a fol of himself and incurring the wrath of his fierce Scottish boss.
It is a tale of timetables and alibis with a reasonable number of red herrings and witnesses whose accounts are not entirely reliable. One credible suspect is summarily dismissed because he sailed from Australia to London in the Orlando second class and second and first class passengers never mix.
After much toing and froing, including a nighttime expedition to the wilds of the Fens, much to the discomfort of Farrar who had to tail a car at a speed above which he was comfortable driving at, Tolefree concludes that the culprit is someone who sailed on the Orlando at the time Miss Vane did, lives in Elford Mansions, maintained a flat for Miss Vane in Kilburn, and who had a rendezvous with Pendleton on the Thursday night in question.
These criteria together with the disappearance of the feather and Aussie penny from the scene of the crime seals the identity of the culprit. In Poirot style he lays out his findings before Lord Greenwood and an assembled group of suspects, demonstrating that Pendleton’s death was committed in self-defence rather than a premeditated act of murder.
It is a complex plot and the story is well told in an engaging style, Walling uses short burst of staccato-like sentences to inject some urgency into the narrative. I could not help thinking, though, that a chat with Miss Vane would have saved a lot of time.
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