Forgotten Book - The Big Ben Alibi

Golden Age detective fiction lends itself to parody and pastiche, but during the Golden Age itself, I'd say there weren't too many laugh-out-loud detective novels. I've come across a very pleasing exception to that general rule, namely The Big Ben Alibi, by Neil Gordon. The name was a pseudonym for the Scottish writer A.G. Macdonell (1895-1941), who appears to have published seven solo detective novels plus one which he co-wrote with Milward Kennedy, The Bleston Mystery.

Macdonell is remembered today, however, for a comic novel rather than a mystery. England, Their England is renowned in particular for a very enjoyable cricket scene, and a cricketer (who tells many boring stories about his career) is one of the members of the supporting cast in The Big Ben Alibi. The story concerns two young detective novelists whose latest novels are turned down by Henry Haddington, their literary agent. They hatch a cunning plan to enable them to recover their fortunes...

John Maclennan, one of the two writers, is a Scot, and I did wonder if he and his colleague George Cranford represented, to an extent at least, jokey versions of Macdonnell and Kennedy. I don't know the answer, but I certainly enjoyed the jokes about the cliches and conventions of Golden Age detective fiction, as well as the skits on popular newspapers. This reads like a book that was a lot of fun to write.

The plot is competently put together (which isn't always the case with comic detective novels) but what makes The Big Ben Alibi stand out is the sheer joie de vivre of the storyline, which involves a country house mystery, an unbreakable alibi and plenty of other tropes of the genre. I'm surprised this book has been so overlooked for so long. 

  

Forgotten Books - Half-Mast Murder

Milward Kennedy was a founder member of the Detection Club, but his novels are long out of print in the UK, and Half-Mast Murder is a good candidate for inclusion in Patti Abbott’s series of Forgotten Books.

Published in 1930, it is a country house murder case, boasting three plans, including one of the octagonal summer house in which Professor Paley, an expert on the subject of international relations, is found stabbed to death. The summer house is locked, but Superintendent Guest soon establishes that the victim was murdered, and the ‘locked room’ element of the story is quite minor. The flag above the summer house is flying at half-mast – but why? The explanation for this aspect of the story is a pretty good one.

The main question is whether the motive for the murder was connected to the dead man’s political views, or to some more commonplace personal or domestic issue. There is one character who appears to be above suspicion throughout, and if I were writing the book, I’d have been tempted to make her the culprit. But Kennedy opts for a different outcome, although the motive is concealed until the end of the book (and because a key fact is not revealed until very late on, he doesn’t really play fair with the reader.) The culprit’s identity is, though, a pleasing twist on an old theme.

Kennedy, whose full name was Milward Roden Kennedy Burge, was an interesting character. His first book was a mystery written with a contemporary from Winchester College, A.G. Macdonell, best known for the humorous classic England, Their England. He wrote few novels after the 30s, though he reviewed crime until the 60s, and lived until 1968. At one time, he worked for the League of Nations, which is name-checked in his book, and I felt this background might have been more fully exploited than in fact proves to be the case. Kennedy was a good enough writer to come up with some very interesting ideas, though not perhaps good enough to make the very best use of them. Even so, this is a sound example of Golden Age fiction of the second rank.