Forgotten Book - The Manuscript Murder

In the course of his regrettably short career, Lewis Robinson, who also wrote as George Limnelius, displayed considerable flair as a mystery writer, making excellent use of his inside knowledge of military life. His best-known book is The Medbury Fort Murder, a locked room mystery of distinction that Bob Adey (who introduced me to his work) greatly admired. 

I acquired from Bob's estate Robinson's personal copy of The Manuscript Murder, published under his own name in 1933. He made a few handwritten notes on the text and also pasted on to the endpapers various reviews of the book. These included in particular a very positive notice in the Sunday Times from Dorothy L. Sayers, which must have given him enormous pleasure. My copy doesn't have a jacket and the above image comes from an excellent blog, The Grandest Game in the World

The Manuscript Murder is, as the title suggests, a 'bibliomystery', of an unusual and intriguing sort. An unconventional structural device is used in a very interesting way. A rich but disliked man dies and there is a very small pool of suspects. One of them, who is Jewish, is a detective novelist. He actually writes a story about the events leading up to the murder. But is he trying to pull the wool over the police's eyes? And what happens when another suspect then puts pen to paper?

I think this is a terrific concept and the story is well-written. The way in which the Jewish character is described would not be acceptable in a modern writer, but Robinson presents him fairly sympathetically and makes use of the antisemitic 'banter' (a loaded term) that the man suffers from his army colleagues as an element in the plot. On the whole, though, I didn't feel that the quality of the mystery quite lived up to my expectations, which were admittedly high. More could be done with this ingenious concept, I feel. But it's a laudably ambitious novel and I'm not surprised that Sayers was impressed.