Forgotten Book - The Cuckoo Line Affair

During my recent trip on the Seabourn Ovation, I had plenty of time for pleasure reading on sea days and on flights to and from the cruise. I took advantage of this to fill in quite a few gaps, and read as many as five books by Andrew Garve, a writer whom I've always liked, but on whose work I've become increasingly keen lately, as the sheer extent of his versatility has become more apparent to me.

The Cuckoo Line Affair, first published in 1953, is a relatively early Garve novel, but it is, like all his books, a fast read and it has the almost mandatory Garve ingredient of small boat sailing (this is one of the reasons I felt his books were very appropriate to a boat trip!) One of the characters, Hugh Latimer, is a writer of crime fiction, and although this aspect of his life is not developed to any great extent, it allows for a very entertaining conversation with his family when he bemoans the way critics review his novels - either because they begin too slowly, or too fast and then tail off - or if they are pacy all the way through, they are dismissed as melodramatic. I bet Garve enjoyed getting that off his chest!

The opening chapter conjures up a rural idyll. Edward Latimer is a jobbing freelance writer of articles who had a brief career as an MP (like Garve's father, who may have been an inspiration for the character in some respects) but has now settled for a quiet life of good works in the English countryside. We meet his unmarried daughter Trudie, his lawyer son Quentin, and Hugh and his delightful future wife Cynthia. The story is almost soporifically pleasant at this point, but drama is injected when Edward goes on a rail journey on the eponymous Cuckoo Line (not the real life one in Sussex/Kent, which fell into disuse but has now been revived, partly, in preserved form, as the Spa Valley Railway, a trip I'd like to make some day). 

Edward meets a pretty girl on the train but disaster occurs when she accuses him of sexual assault. It seems unlikely that this nice chap could be guilty, but witnesses corroborate the claim (there is also a sort of foreshadowing of the crime in the much better-known 4.50 from Paddington, published a few years later: I wonder if Agatha had read this novel, also published in the Collins Crime Club) and Quentin wants Edward to plead guilty in the hope of getting a soft sentence. But Edward has other ideas, not all of them sensible.

The plot quickly thickens and the focus shifts to the attempts of Hugh, Cynthia, and Quentin to help Edward restore his reputation. There are several ingenious twists, although some suspension of disbelief is required (why didn't they talk to the police sooner? for instance). But when Garve does skate on thin ice, he does so cleverly, and there was a plot twist regarding the train incident that I didn't see coming. An enjoyable book.