Miles Burton, better known as John Rhode, wrote a long series of novels featuring Desmond Merrion. The Three Corpse Trick, first published in 1944, has been judged as one of the best if not the very best of them. Nick Fuller, a shrewd critic of Golden Age mysteries whose blog I heartily recommend, has described it as a masterpiece. For me, one of the most intriguing aspects of the story is that the Second World War is ignored. We are explicitly told that Merrion's duties in the intelligence section of the Admiralty have ceased and he is free to roam around the English countryside again, solving mysteries in the company of his chum Inspector Arnold. Presumably Rhode was by this time confident that the war would be won. Or perhaps he simply didn't want to think about it any more.
The first chapter is devoted to a Mrs Burge's wanderings around a village in Deanshire, collecting money for charity. This approach enables the author to introduce us to a host of characters who will later feature in the story and provide a wealth of background information. At this early stage I picked up on one reference which eventually proved to be crucial to the plot. These things can happen, but I think many authors would have introduced the characters more gradually and painted them in a little more detail. In the event, two people who are pivotal to the story are peripheral figures, to say the least, and this does seem to me to be a weakness. And including a map of the neighbourhood would have been a big help.
Poor Mrs Burge is promptly murdered and Inspector Arnold is determined that her husband - who has vanished - is the guilty party. It takes quite a long time for the reasons for Burge's absence to become clear, and at around that stage of the novel we are also given some further information which proves to be highly relevant. At this point I realised the signifcance of the title and figured out what was going on.
Eventually, Merrion tumbles to the dastardly scheme. The crimes are neatly contrived, but I feel that a more talented writer could have made more of the raw material of the plot. It's definitely one of the better Rhode/Burton books that I've read, but it's also one which illustrates some of his shortcomings as a storyteller. Worth reading, but very guessable.
7 comments:
I have a great fondness for the John Rhode Dr Priestley books. I've been less impressed by the Miles Burtons although I was quite taken with Death at Low Tide. I thought the impossible crime angle was handled very neatly.
I must try to get hold of The Corpse Trick. A number of people have recommended it very warmly.
Thanks for the mention, Martin!
This is one of the few Streets that fooled me; usually, the "Who" part of his plots is quite transparent.
I wish I could comment more intelligently on the book itself; I read it more than 20 years ago!
I agree that this is one of the best books written under the Burton name (although I haven't read that many of them) - and I did not guess the denouement!
Is there a link to Nick Fuller's blog here?
Thanks very much for these comments. Bill, I keep meaning to spring clean my blog links, axing those I don't bother with and including some excellent ones like Nick's, i.e. https://grandestgame.wordpress.com/
Thank you for the link. There is a lot of spring cleaning.Of the last twenty only five are regularly updated and four are dead links or wrong.
Yes, Bill, that is what has deterred me! But I will get round to it...
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