John Bude, Death Makes a Prophet

John Bude, Death Makes a Prophet
British Library Crime Classics 2017
© Estate of John Bude 2017
ISBN 978-0-7123-5691-6
Also available as an ebook

There was a spate of mystery novels (some mentioned by Martin Edwards in his introduction) that are centered around a religious cult, in the 1930s and 1940s[1].  Some of these treat the cult gently or humorously (as is the case here); in other cases, the cult is quite sinister (The Dain Curse will suffice as an example).  In Death Makes a Prophet, we spend something over half the book following the (modest) travails of the Children of Osiris, founded (and presided over) by Eustace Mildmann.  The Cult is known familiarly as COO (Cult Of Osiris), or COOism.  Mildmann (who mostly lives up to his last name) is making a decent income as the High Prophet (£5,000 per year or about $25,000, in the late 1940s; that’s the equivalent of about $250,000 today).

Nonetheless he has his problems.  The chief supported of the venture, Mrs.Alic1a Hagge-Smith, seems interested in a more aggressive approach to the thing.  A secondary suporter, Mr. Hansford Boot, is a strong supporter of Mildmann.  Then there’s the somewhat mysterious Mr. Peta Peneti, the Prophet-in-Waiting, doing his waiting on a mere £500.  And Miss Penelope Parker, on whom both Mildmann and Peneti have designs (the former, honorable; the latter, not so much).

The first 60% or so of the book revolves around the internal machinations of COOism, and, as a result, the story advances at a very leisurely pace.  But this is a mystery novel, and so we do have a theft of a religious artifact, a shooting (of Mildmann’s chauffer, who has been mistaken for someone else), and, eventually a murder (actually, two of the principal dramatis personnae), by prussic acid.  And so Inspector Meredith (sans any backup from Scotland Yard) arrives on the scene.

His investigation is not undertaken at a whirlwind pace, either.  He speaks, more than once, to the principals and makes some headway in identifying who they are, were they were, and who might have a motive.  Finally, as the result of information obtained, but not by Meredith, we arrive at the conclusion.  Which consists of Meredith summarizing his conclusions for the relevant police higher-ups in about two pages, wherein we receive a mass of information we have never seen before.

And thus endeth the investigation.  This is the second or third of Bude’s books about Meredith, and it is decidedly the least of them.  It took we a while –over a week—to get through the 285 pages that it took to tell this story.  And while it was not aggressively bad, or badly written, it also did not exactly rivet me.  It seems likely that Inspector Meredith will not be high on ly list of things to read,

[1] And the religious cult continues to show  up on occasion in contemporary mystery fiction.  Timothy Hallinan’s The Four Last Things (1989), featuring Simeon Grist, for one.  A fairly comprehensive discussion can be found here:
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/prophets-and-loss-when-cults-meet-crime-trouble-wi/