E.C.R. Lorac, Murder By Matchlight

E.C.R. Lorac, Murder By Matchlight
(Edith Caroline Rivett)
Dover re-print 1988; original (U.K.) publication Collins (Crime Club), 1945.
ISBN 978-0-486-25577-4

Lorac was a prolific “golden-age author” of at least 75 mysteries between 1931 and 1959, the majority of which featured Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald.  Macdonald is a mild-mannered investigator, whose approach [at least in the 2 books I have read so far; the other Bats in the Belfry (1937)] seems to be to gain the trust of the people he’s questioning and using his sense of logic and order to sort things out.  There’s little overt violence and whatever reliance there is on “scientific” aspects of investigation is pretty much left to one side.

In this outing, a man (John Ward is the name on his identity card) is killed in a park, during the blackout (it’s WW2, and so none of the park’s lights are on), on a cloudy, moonless night.  In the park, at the same time, are two other men, Bruce Mallaig (who is wandering around, slightly depressed because his fiancé has cancelled a dinner date) and Stanley Clayton (who is out of work, and overheard a telephone call setting a rendezvous between the man making the call—who referred to himself as “Tim” and to the person with whom he was speaking as “Joe” that aroused his curiosity.  The night is describes as so dark that there was virtually no visibility, except for that provided by a match when Ward lights a cigarette.[1]

Macdonald arrives on the scene where Mallaig and Claydon have been detained by a police officer who came in response to Mallaig’s shouts for assistance.  (A doctor who was walking his dog has verified that Ward is dead.)  And the investigation begins.

It leads him to the boarding house at which Ward lived.  Most of the inhabitants are working in one or another form of theater, and are (of course) eccentric.  Ward is quickly established as a ne’er-do-well, who seems to have lived by sponging off others and occasional fiddles, but an interesting one—he fought with the IRA in the 1920s; he attempted to enlist for WW2, but was rejected because of a permanently bad leg, and so on. 

The bulk of the book involved Macdonald’s efforts to confirm (or find holes in) the stories he has been told, and he eventually does.  If the conclusion seems a bit forced (and not, in my opinion, all that well deducible by the reader), it works quite well dramatically.  For an author I’d never heard of until the last couple of months, Lorac has been a pleasant surprise, and I’ll be on the lookout for more.

[1] I don’t entirely buy the complete darkness scenario, though.  I’ve never actually wandered around in that sort of complete darkness, but even outdoors at night with heavy clouds, I’ve always been able to see something.