Forgotten Book - Death of a Banker

Anthony Wynne had a knack of dreaming up excellent "impossible crime scenarios", as readers of his enjoyable British Library Crime Classic Murder of a Lady know. So I approached his 1934 novel Death of a Banker with high hopes, and found that the story opens brilliantly. We are presented with the central problem in the first chapter, during a conversation between the "Giant of Harley Street", Dr Eustace Hailey, and the Chief of the C.I.D., Colonel Wickham.

A banker called Hall takes part in a hunt in Northumberland. He is seen to fall from his horse in the middle of a grass park, in front of fourteen witnesses, and when they reach his body, they find that he has been stabbed to death. How could he possibly have been murdered? As the despairing Wickham says, it's "one of those new ideas in killing".

Duly tantalised,I read on. Before long, however, I began to fear that the superb opening would be as good as it got, and so, I'm sorry to say, it proved. Wynne, who was very interested in economics, had a lot to say about the way that bankers behave, and many of us would agree with his reservations about them. But, interested though I am in the impact of politics and economics on Golden Age fiction, the part played by international finance in the storyline soon becomes intensely tedious..

There are two distinct recurrent features in poor Golden Age mysteries. One is the presence of American gangsters - here, at least, Chicago gunmen are mercifully absent The other is the presence of political leaders from a fictitious European state on the brink of revolution, and here we have a prince whose position as head of state is threatened by those pesky Communists. I found the plot involving the prince tedious in the extreme, and I kept reading simply to learn the solution to the impossible murder. But even that was plucked out of thin air.

There are a few nice lines, such as: "Since Europe became the slave market of money-lenders, loyalty has almost completely disappeared as the basis of government", and it's clear that Wynne was keen to write about topical issues. But I don't think it works, and I doubt it worked even in 1934. Suffice to say, I felt this book was markedly inferior to Murder of a Lady.

Forgotten Book - Murder of a Lady

I stumbled across today's Forgotten Book by chance. Anthony Wynne's Murder of a Lady (1931) appeared in a dealer's catalogue a few weeks ago, a paperback at a very modest price. Should I bother with it? I wondered. After all, I've more than enough books waiting patiently to be read. And though Wynne wrote a well-known Golden Age short story, "The Cyprian Bees", I've always gathered that the consensus is, he was a rather dull writer. But I took the plunge anyway, and for some reason promoted this book to be read ahead of other more obviously deserving candidates.

I dropped lucky. Rather than being a so-so reading experience, Murder of a Lady proved to be excellent, and far surpassed my admittedly modest expectations. It's a locked room mystery, and I do have a weakness for these, but quite frankly I didn't anticipate that I'd enjoy this one rather more than some of the lesser works by the great master of the locked room, the wonderful John Dickson Carr. Carr was stronger on character and atmosphere than Wynne, for sure, but this particular book does work very well indeed.

We are plunged into the action in the opening pages. Wynne's regular amateur detective, Dr Eustace Hailey, is staying with a friend who happens to be a Procurator Fiscal when news comes of a murder in the vicinity. It's taken place in the castle, and an elderly lady has been stabbed to death. But her corpse was found in a locked room, and there's no trace of a weapon....

Another murder - quite unexpected - swiftly follows, and suspicion swirls around a small cast of suspects. Why were herring scales found at the scenes of the crime? Was the first victim not really a 'lady', but  rather a very nasty piece of work? The second question is much easier to answer than the first. Another unforeseen murder occurs before Dr Hailey starts to figure out what is going on. I found this book gripping and clever. Wynne was prolific, and it may well be that this was his masterpiece - if not,, I'd like to read any book of his that is more baffling. As you will have gathered, I really liked this one.