Forgotten Book - The Shadow on the Downs

The Shadow on the Downs, my Forgotten Book for today, is the second novel that R.C. Woodthorpe wrote in quick succession about an acerbic retired schoolteacher called Miss Perks It first came out in 1935, although another four years passed before this fairly obscure yet very interesting writer produced another mystery. I'd rate it as one of his best, and it's a pity that it marked Miss Perks' swan song.

The setting is a village on the edge of the Sussex Downs, close to a resort called Helmstone (I presume this is based on Brighton). The peaceful rural life of the villagers is about to be disturbed by the construction of a motor race track. A councillor who supports the scheme is found dead in the porch of a church, and Miss Perks, who is staying with her nephew, becomes intrigued.

As always with Woodthorpe, the style is discursive. His main interest is in social comedy, and his portrayal of an intellectual tramp and a young man who wants to write detective fiction allow plenty of scope for humour that is pretty well done. He's also unsparing of corruption in local government and greedy enterpreneurs. Miss Perks' acerbic and often rude manner conceal a fierce intelligence and an unexpected human sympathy. However, she fails to avert one tragedy which is of a kind that one seldom encounters in detective novels of the period and which demonstrates that Woodthorpe's interests extended well beyond the puzzle of whodunit.

In fact, the detective work here is pretty good, better than you sometimes find with this author. Miss Perks does justice as she sees fit - rather as Holmes, Poirot and Roger Sheringham used to do. Despite all the digressions (I imagine Agatha Christie, whose books at the time were very tightly structured, must have despaired of Woodthorpe, though Dorothy L. Sayers was a huge fan) it's a novel I really enjoyed reading, and I hope some enterprising publisher will make it available again to a new set of readers.

Forgotten Book - Death in a Little Town

I’ve previously covered R.C.Woodthorpe in the Forgotten Books series, and today I’m returning to this currently obscure writer who was, for a few years, quite close to the top of the tree. But Woodthorpe’s career was short, and it’s symptomatic of the neglect into which he has fallen that, although he was an early recruit to the Detection Club, he has been missed off the list of members for a number of years!

Death in a Little Town was the first of two books he published in the mid-Thirties which featured Miss Matilda Perks (the other is A Shadow on the Downs, which I haven’t yet tracked down - this one is available on the Hathi site and I am really indebted to Christos for directing me to it.) Miss Perks is a sharp-tongued former schoolteacher who lives with her brother Robert and a loquacious parrot called Ramsay Macdonald. She does not, however, operate in this story as an amateur sleuth in the Jane Marple mould, though she is perceptive and inquisitive. When, ultimately, she discovers the truth, she keeps quiet about it.

The story concerns the battering to death, by a spade, of an unpleasant wealthy man called Bonar. He is a landowner in the Sussex town of Chesworth, and it is pretty clear that what really interested Woodthorpe was portraying the town and its people, rather than setting an elaborate puzzle to be solved. The key characters include a novelist and an eccentric bachelor, but no attempt is made to characterise Bonar, and thus it is difficult to care about what happened to him.

Woodthorpe was, I think, not a natural detective novelist. He was primarily interested in social comedy. There is a lot of dialogue in this book that does not take the story forward, though to some extent it portrays the people of the story entertainingly and amusingly. That, I’m afraid, wasn’t enough for me to love this story, but Woodthorpe could write well, and it’s a pity that inspiration started to desert him after only a handful of books.