Forgotten Book - Miss Hamblett's Ghost

Alan Brock, whom I've mentioned before on this blog, strikes me as an interesting and under-estimated writer, but there's no doubt that his work has long suffered from neglect and today's book really is forgotten. In fact, I was unaware of it until I saw a first edition (see the above photo) go relatively cheaply to someone in an online auction recently. I found a very cheap copy elsewhere and enjoyed reading it.

The novel is Miss Hamblett's Ghost and it was published in 1946, although there is a prologue set during the First World War and most of the action takes place during the Second World War. In a disclaimer at the front of the book, Brock explains that several of the incidents in the story have equivalents in real life. I'm not sure which cases inspired the story, and I'd be intrigued to find out. 

Brock was very interested in true crime, and wrote about it himself. He also wrote a history of fireworks, as he was a member of the Brock family whose name was closely associated with firework manufacture for many years. He claimed to be 'of the eighth generation of a family of pyrotechnists', which is a nice way of putting it! Several of his books are based on real life cases - a good example is Earth to Ashes, which I discussed here more than eight years ago.

This novel features in Bob Adey's Locked Room Murders, because of the intriguing events described in the prologue, which - perhaps uniquely -  show someone taking steps to commit a locked room murder. The central mystery doesn't, however, concern a locked room. In some ways, this is more of a howdunit than a whodunit. As a detective called Beach figures out the strange goings-on concerning an inherited title, it's fairly obvious who is the villain of the piece, but that's not the key question. I think the constraints of the real life inspiration may have inhibited the building of excitement, as the story falters (but only slightly) after a great start. Perhaps it's a story that would work better artistically (not commercially, though!) as a novella. That said, I did relish the unravelling of the criminal's cunning - and remarkably long-term - scheme.