Forgotten Book - The Dead Mouse

The Dead Mouse is an odd title for an odd book. It was published in 1930 by Austen Allen, the second of four detective novels that he produced in the course of a short crime writing career. I don't know much about Allen, but I can imagine that he was dismayed that his publishers managed to spell his first name Austin on the dust jacket of this one, although they did get it right on the spine, the binding, and the title page. These things happen...

Allen's first novel, Menace to Mrs Kershaw, introduced his series character Inspector Ord and earned good reviews, including one from Arnold Bennett, who did quite a bit of crime reviewing for a while. Allen was praised for originality of concept, of murder method, and for pairing his cop with a novelist, a young woman called Sabina Gibson, who 'reconstructs' the past of key characters, so that clues to what has happened come to light.

These qualities are present in The Dead Mouse (which, unlike its predecessor, doesn't seem to have been published in the United States) and I get the impression that Allen was an ambitious writer who wanted to do something different with the detective novel. This is praiseworthy, although I don't think the result is anything like a complete success, despite being quite well-written, with a focus on characterisation that was far from common in detective stories at the time.

Two people, Major Henry Pinder, and Miss Monica Vine, are found dead in Wimpole's Turkish Baths on the same day. Ord suspects murder, but the way he goes about his investigation is unorthodox, to say the least. He spends much more time discussing things with Sabina than with his colleagues at Scotland Yard, and his approach to the inquiry seems haphazard at best. A dead mouse found at the Baths gives a clue to what has happened, and Monica Vine is also, metaphorically, a 'dead mouse'. There is a lengthy chapter reconstructing Pinder's life and a shorter (but still long) chapter doing the same for Monica. This method of storytelling is unusual (Henry Wade did something slightly similar in The Lonely Magdalen, but with only one flashback section, and his story was constructed much more elegantly) and it slows things down in a rather curious and discursive way. 

The end of the story is strange and quite interesting, although it feels underdeveloped, because we know nothing about one significant character: whether he reappeared in Allen's later mysteries, I'm uncertain, because Allen's books are hard to find. I was drawn to this one mainly because I had the chance to buy an inscribed copy at a reasonable price, and I'm glad I did. Allen (1887-1958) enjoyed success as a playwright, and one of his plays, Pleasure Cruise, was filmed in 1933. He gave up on detective fiction quite quickly, and I haven't found any reviews of his mysteries online. So, definitely a forgotten book. But a book that is, despite its flaws, rather interesting.