The Mendip Mystery by Lynn Brock - For the 1929 Club

 Lynn Brock published two books in 1929. The first is the charming but light The Dagwort Coombe Murder, which I’ve also reviewed for the club. The second is The Mendip Mystery.

In this case we are in the hands of a professional detective, Colonel Gore (book five of seven in the series) who has been tasked with trying to trace a long-lost relation of a dapper little furniture merchant, and, in what appears to be an unrelated matter, to meet a possible new client at an unpopular inn to discuss another job. Despite mild annoyance at the venue, made with no thought of his convenience but purely because his prospective client will be hunting out that way, Gore agrees.

The set up is excellent.  High winds and fallen trees and a hunting accident earlier in the day result in several guests being stranded at the inn overnight, much to the proprietor’s dissatisfaction, since he just wants to get (more) drunk in peace and hasn’t enough sheets anyway. Understandably some of those guests decide not to go to bed at all and of course in the morning, one is found dead.

Brock has a great eye for detail, the state of the inn itself, the converted storage building in town and it’s creepiness after dark, the frustrations of a secretary who wants an extra day off for Christmas and is trying to time the asking of it right and go above and beyond in the meantime to earn brownie points, but resentful of the need.

If I had to criticise I would say there’s a lot going on in this book. One subplot about escaped lunatics (whose treatment is very much of the time I’m afraid, kicked back out into the storm and left), and another about diamonds – a long history by one of the characters about how he stumbled across a ditch full of rough diamonds in Namaqualand, which has since been found and worked by the British government, that I was half inclined to think completely made up until I read my last book, a non-fiction work by Arthur Conan Doyle, where he describes that exact place. Clearly Brock incorporated it because it was big news.

It's also often quite a funny book, although not with the obvious humour of Dagwort Coombe, with the odd call back to earlier stories. I’m tempted to go back and start this series from the beginning now. 

Thanks as always to Simon and Karen for running these clubs.