The Veron Mystery (1939)
In America as Mr. Clunk's Text.
1939 Doubleday Doran blurb:
Joseph Axton’s death was the first episode in as strange a set of circumstances as ever confronted Mr. Clunk. Other deaths were to follow, and Joshua was to be temporarily perplexed by the fragments of glass discovered in a dead woman’s dress, the leak in the lead mine, and the raven’s cry. Eventually, however, a fire was set in the gorse and Joshua found a small bottle beside a dead body. It was Joshua’s not-too-legal handling of this bottle which eventually uncovered as shrewd and adroit a murderer as Mr. Clunk had encountered in his many years’ experience in crime.
H.C. Bailey, long noted as the creator of Reggie Fortune and as one of the outstanding mystery story writers of his day, has in this book developed Joshua Clunk to a new peak. Nothing more need be said than that this is a top-notch H.C. Bailey mystery story.
My review:
Yet another disappointing novel from a writer whose short stories are at the very top of the form—especially disappointing in that the problem is domestic, rather than espionage-based, and in that the police and Mr. Clunk actively co-operate, without suspicion or mistrust. The story is set in Vernshire, a former mining and farming district, the desolate landscape of which Bailey evokes with considerable skill, lending to the book a sinister and brooding tone. Joe Axton, an unpleasant profiteer, falls from his horse at his son Dan's quarry, and is poisoned after making a new will leaving his fortune to a girl hiker, Nell Drew, camping on the moors with her friend Pat Coverdale. Mr. Clunk is called into the case by Axton's housekeeper, who suspects somethingn is wrongn with the will—and is found dead in the river, murdered. Suspicion falls on Axton's cousin Mrs. Woodbury, on her husband, and on their nephew; on the lawyer, Francis Tover, who has been embezzling his trust; and on Dr. Crewys. It takes an attempted murder by lead poisoning and a death by barbiturate poisoning for Mr. Clunk to solve a crime, which he does in a particularly unorthodox manner, tampering with evidence in order to hang a person innocent of that death. There is no particular surprise as to the murderer's identity, yet there are too few clues. The connoisseur would be advised to read the short stories.