Mystery Authors (F)

Alec Maitland, after several years abroad, returns to London down on his luck, when he meets a former friend, Charles Biddulph, an official in one of the chief Government Offices in Whitehall. Biddulph, aware of Maitland’s special gifts and at the moment in need of a secret agent whose connection with the Ministry would not be suspected, offers him a commission to ferret out certain strange happenings which threaten a British Crown Colony in Africa. Maitland, temporarily living over a tobacco shop in Soho and selling photographic enlargements for a dealer, accepts with alacrity. But he soon finds the job much more difficult and dangerous than it was represented by Biddulph, when the scene moves from London to the Scottish grouse moor. The tale is one of the open air, of wits pitted against wits, of bloodshed, of hair-breadth escapes, of flight and pursuit, of intrigue in high places, finishing with a piece of neat detection and a surprise both for the guileless Maitland and the reader.

Death Comes to Perigord is a detective story concerned with the disappearance and subsequent death of a man while under the care of a young doctor in the absence of the usual medical attendant. The story is set in the Channel Islands, among a mixed population of French and English, but the interest first lies in the discovery by the young doctor of certain peculiarities in the dead body which flatly contradict each other. And the doubts then raised are reinforced by the doctor’s discovery of a small peculiarity about the dead man’s watch. Subsequent clues include a ship’s figurehead, a perfumed handkerchief, a knife blade, a barking dog, and a tennis ball that had been gilded, and these apparently disconnected objects Detective McNab, with the help of Dr. Dunn, builds up into a connected and coherent sequence which, step by step, unravels the part played by each article in the murder and leads to the identification of the real criminal.

On the lonely Keppoch moor a dense fog was settling while four young sportsmen doggedly continued their “shoot.” There was a sudden report and a few minutes later one of the party was discovered seriously wounded. Several days after, when the victim of that unfortunate “accident” was well on the road to recovery in his host’s house, he was found shot through the temple. The local police investigated with unusual thoroughness and ingenuity, and had it not been for one minor fact, the first shooting would have passed as accident, the second as suicide. But that single detail was enough to arouse the suspicions of Francis MacNab whose detective genius is well known to readers of other Ferguson mysteries. The criminal had made none of the mistakes so helpful to the detective, and MacNab was unaided by any of those intuitions which are convenient in fiction but seldom occur in real life. The result is a study in detection that will meet the approval of the most exacting reader, while a sinister premonition and tense excitement throughout will hold him to the last page.