Forgotten Book - Murder of a Snob

Roy Vickers was a prolific author who is best known for his entertaining short stories about the Department of Dead Ends, but his novels have long been out of print. My first Forgotten Book for 2013 is one of his last books, Murder of a Snob, which was published in 1949, and has now reappeared under Pan Macmillan's Bello imprint. The Bello list features numerous Vickers titles, many of them hitherto impossible to find.

"Samuel Cornboise was murdered because he was a snob" is a first sentence almost worthy of a Francis Iles or a Ruth Rendell. I wouldn't pretend, though, that Vickers is in the same league as a writer. Yet this book shows what he was capable of. The plot is elaborate, making use of Vickers' legal knowledge (he trained as a barrister before turning to journalism) and, although there is only one murder, suspense and interest is maintained quite well from start to finish. The victim's snobbery is a personality flaw which clearly interested Vickers, because he wrote an entirely separate Dead Ends story with a similar title. My guess, for what it's worth, is that Vickers had suffered a good deal from snobbery, and found writing about the subject cathartic.

The victim, who has the title of Lord Watlington, is a self-made man who is bludgeoned to death in his own home. Ralph, his nephew and heir, confesses to the crime - but is he guilty? There are several possible suspects, including the lovely Claudia, whose disreputable past had so annoyed his Lordship when Ralph decided to marry her, an artist and his lover, the deceased's wife (from whom he was long separated) and Querk, a crafty chap who looked after Watlington's business affairs.

I'm very glad that print on demand and digital publishing make obscure books like this available again at affordable prices. Vickers is well worth a look. I am sure he wrote too much, and I think he was better suited to short stories than novels because in the longer form he found it difficult not to digress.But there are some nice touches in this story which make it well worth reading.

Forgotten Book - The Department of Dead Ends

The Department of Dead Ends is Roy Vickers' most famous book. The eponymous Department is also his most famous creation - a fictional part of Scotland Yard, presided over by Detective Inspector Rason, which collected seemingly trivial and inconsequential bits and pieces associated with unsolved cases, and every once in a while managed to interpret those stray scraps of evidence so as to pin the crime on a hitherto unsuspected culprit.

Julian Symons and Ellery Queen were among the very good judges who lauded the "inverted mystery" short stories featuring the Department, and thanks to their advocacy, these stories are by far the best known of the countless stories that Vickers wrote. Is the praise deserved? I think so. There is an element of formula about the stories, once you have read several, and I think it's best to read them in small quantities. But that's true, in my opinion, of the great Father Brown stories too. You can have too much of a good thing, certainly, but I am quite clear that the Dead Ends stories are good thing.

"The Rubber Trumpet", the first of the stories, is justly famous, but several others are equally good. One story is plainly based on the Brides in the Bath case, while another, the excellent "The Henpecked Murderer", explicitly references the Crippen case. I hadn't read this story before, or been aware of it, and I though Vickers used the elements of the Crippen story very cleverly to create an intriguing tale.

Vickers' preoccupation with snobbery and social climbing is very evident in this collection, happily made available to modern readership by Bello - so much so that one senses he was working out "issues" of his own. The stories are very crisp and entertaining, and some of the writing - for instance, the opening paragraph of "The Yellow Jumper" - is very good indeed. This is a genuine classic.