Forgotten Book - Death in the Wheelbarrow

You simply don't come across books with titles like Death in the Wheelbarrow these days. More's the pity, do you think? Anyway, I'd never heard of this book, published in 1935 and written by William Gore, until I was offered a nicely inscribed copy. I do love old books with authorial inscriptions and I succumbed to the temptation to buy it. To be truthful, I wasn't expecting a masterpiece, though I was encouraged to discover that Dorothy L. Sayers had praised Gore's first book, There's Death in the Churchyard. And I must say that I really did enjoy this one enormously. A real find.

William Gore wrote just three detective novels. The name was an alias for an artist called Jan Gordon (actually his precisely correct name was Godfrey Jervis Gordon) and there is an interesting website devoted to Gordon and his wife Cora which contains a great deal of information about them, although not much about this particular book. They sound like an interesting and talented couple. I gather that Gore's crime writing earned him the nickname 'Bloody Bill', a name which features in the inscription in my copy.

This novel has a number of distinct strengths. First, the storyline is unusual and unpredictable. Second, the writing is genuinely witty - one or two lines made me laugh out loud. And third, the plot is pretty good. Even though the pool of suspects is small, I thought Gore juggled suspicion very cleverly. So cleverly that I'd now like to read his other two mysteries. 

The body of a mysterious, affluent local man called Eccles in a quiet English village keeps the police guessing. The various detectives are engagingly characterised and so - despite an excess of phonetically rendered dialogue - are the villagers. Gore makes effective and enjoyable use of his artistic know-how in the story and has some fun at the expense of two characters who are nudists. There's also a nicely described trial scene. On this evidence, it's a huge pity that Gore didn't write any more.