Dead Man's Shoes (1942)
In America as Nobody's Vineyard.
1942 Doubleday Doran blurb:
Mr. Bailey’s Joshua Clunk becomes slier and more inscrutable as the years and the books go by. Always a champion of the weak and oppressed, he never fails to turn to Josh’s advantage the perplexities and disorders in which other less gifted humans involve themselves.
In the obscure affair of the orphan boy, for instance, no one but Mr. Clunk saw the far-reaching tentacles of avarice which were to bring about the deaths of four people and lead to the extinction of more than one guilty soul. Clunk followed the affair through his clerk, Hopley, and what Hopley reported and could not understand Joshua fitted into his own little scheme and interpreted according to his own lights. The metamorphosis of an ice goddess, the sudden and undue interest in a part of the village forgotten by both God and prosperous men, the unexplained trips of a real-estate promoter—all these things spelt to Joshua’s ultimate triumph and personal gain.
Nobody’s Vineyard is truly representative of Joshua Clunk and H.C. Bailey.
My review:
I hope not, indeed I hope not, that nobody believes this book to be truly representative of Joshua Clunk and H.C. Bailey, for there is nothing more disappointing than a book in which the story-telling is excellent, the characterisation amusing, and the pace lively, yet in which the solution is a complete muddle, badly plotted and incoherent. That is the fatal flaw of Dead Man’s Shoes, the worst H.C. Bailey novel I have read so far.
Although the coastal town of Calbay, "the sort of place that tried to go too big and made a flop," is well drawn, as a detective story it is very weak. As with most Bailey novels, the police are untrustworthy; here, the murder of a pot-boy leads to rivalry between the County Police and the town Police, while Inspector Uvedale comes under suspicion of the crime, and of those that follow. Throughout the account of Clunk and Hopley's detection, the writing is entertaining and stylish, the characters interesting, and the incidents varied.
Then comes the ending. This is awful. Although there are clues to the murderers’ identities (creosote on Gussage’s coat; a would-be blackmailer’s accusation of murder; the behaviour of a certain character), the ending is a complete muddle, the reader unable to work out who did what or why. Among other errors, Inspector Uvedale’s behaviour is inconsistent throughout; the attack on Coad is not explained; and, if the individual whom Mr. Clunk implies killed Arden (as the blue cloth indicates), the fact that the weapon was taken from Alderman Higmore’s car is never explained. Here, “Mr. Clunk’s unusual obscurity annoys [the reader] and sharpen[s] impatience at the waste of his abilities on Calbay to criticism that the old man had got so tricky he sold himself pups.”