If I had had the very slightest premonition once I took that bungalow that I used to be about to be blended up in an affair corresponding to that which developed from a sure night time in June, I ought to in all probability have fled to the ends of the earth–or, at any fee, have remained in my outdated lodgings at Dover.
The third J. S. Fletcher thriller novel from 1930 that was printed in the US was The South Foreland Homicide. I like this e-book moderately higher than the primary from that 12 months, The Borgia Cupboard, primarily as a result of it feels extra “actual world.” Cupboard was a generic synthetic nation home thriller however Foreland appears extra like one thing that may actually have taken place.
The story is narrated by a Dover solicitor bachelor named Savvery, who has rented a bungalow close to the village of St. Margaret at Cliffe, situated between Dover and Deal, not removed from the South Foreland Lighthouse. It’s set explicitly in 1911, three years earlier than the outbreak of the Nice Warfare, although the e-book was printed in 1930–a nineteen-year disparity! The Fletcher mysteries from the later Twenties and the Thirties which I’ve learn have all felt decidedly anachronistic to me; maybe they’re all meant to be set prior to now, inside just a few years on both aspect of the warfare.
Fletcher was solely 57 in 1920, which is hardly, I’d say (maybe defensively), superannuated; however he would not appear to have been involved with maintaining with trendy occasions, making it stunning that he appears unquestionably to have been the most well-liked “trendy” English thriller author in the US throughout the Roaring Twenties.
Maybe the majority of Fletcher’s anglophiliac studying viewers missed the “good outdated days” earlier than the warfare, an ostensibly gentler time when autos have been nonetheless a novelty, much less ahead girls wore massive hats and lengthy clothes and gangland slayings seemingly weren’t a weekly incidence in Chicago and different perilous city American citadels.
One other massively standard English thriller author throughout the Jazz Age was the equally old style E. Phillips Oppenheim, to not point out the good Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose detective Sherlock Holmes made his “final bow” on the eve of the Nice Warfare, solely to take the stage once more to unravel but extra homicide instances, retrospectively set, between 1924 and 1927. It took nothing lower than the Grim Reaper Himself lastly to place a full cease to the crime writing careers of those Victorian/Edwardian males.
As a bunch Doyle’s final Holmes tales are, reality be informed, fairly weak broth in comparison with these from the glory days, although “The Downside of Thor Bridge” is usually beloved and there is a lot to be mentioned for the ultimate Holmes story, “Shoscombe Outdated Place.” Fletcher’s later works from the Thirties typically are shorter and weaker than those from the late teenagers and early Twenties. I feel Foreland is without doubt one of the higher ones, nevertheless.
To get again to this e-book (lastly), lawyer Savvery’s bungalow neighbors are:
Mr. Rennard, a pleasant, apparent man of means, “all the time able to cross the time of day and to ask you into his bungalow for a whiskey and soda and an uncommonly good cigar.”
Mr. and Mrs. Thacker, a “grocer and Italian warehouseman” and his fairly, youthful spouse, who’s “homosexual, vivacious and one thing of a chatterbox.”
Mr. Chettle, in a cottage a little bit additional away, “a quiet, moony-looking chap,” a type of artists.
This sunny setup is quickly disturbed when Mr. Rennard one early morning is discovered shot to demise at his bungalow–most effectively, narratively-speaking, on the finish of chapter one. Savvery finds himself on the middle of occasions (the ingenuous police are fairly good about ceaselessly together with him of their investigative efforts); there are vanished jewels, a favourite plot contrivance of Fletcher; and, a lot much less typical of the creator, at the very least in my expertise, a moderately shockingly bloody climax in Monte Carlo (tactfully informed at second hand, however nonetheless….).
It is the same old Fletcher method in some ways, together with the answer that involves each the investigators and the readers by happenstance, nevertheless it’s extremely readable, the narrative happening like, one presumes, these whisky and sodas of Rennards. I’ve to offer Fletcher credit score: he was good, and supremely environment friendly, at what he did. So long as you do not count on by the e-book truthful play detection, locked rooms and ingenious clues and the like, it is best to get pleasure from all of it in the event you like basic British mysteries.
Was Fletcher actually a kind of precursor of the police procedural? Maybe so, the extra I give it some thought, although admittedly his depiction of police work makes outdated Freeman Crofts appear like Jack Webb or Ed McBain. However, actually, whereas we’re revising all the things else about there classic period of thriller, we actually ought to take into consideration starting to reckon with the “Dean of Thriller Writers,” Mr. J. S. Fletcher.
