FORGOTTEN BOOK: THE CORPSE WITH THE BLISTERED HAND

The Corpse with the Blistered Hand by R.A. J. Walling (first pu8blished in England as Dust in the Vault, 1939)

Robert Alfred John Walling (1869-1949) was a British journalist and, in his later years, a Golden Age Detective writer who was sometimes classed with Agatha Christie for ingenuity.  Walling started his career as a reporter in Plymouth.  In 1891, he started a newspaper focusing on football (which, because he was British, means soccer).  Two years later he became editor in chief of Bicycling News.  The following year, he helped launch the Western Evening Herald, the first evening newspaper in Plymouth.  In 1904, he was named managing director/editor of the Western Evening Newspaper Company, and joined the Board of Directors in 1915; he remained on the Board until his death.  He was named a magistrate in 1910 and served in that post for several years, during which time he became interested in crime.  By 1913 he began serializing detective novels in the British newspapers.  His first detective novel was published in France in 1927.  The first Philip Tolefree mystery, The Fatal Five Minutes, came out in 1932; Tolefree was featured in 23 novels, ending with 1949's The Corpse with the Missing Watch.

Tolefree was an upper class insurance broker who solved murders; his Watson, James Farrar, was a ship broker.  As far as I can tell, neither of them did much broking in the novels, of which the earlier ones were narrated by Farrar, who was then relegated to a character in later books.  Many of the U.S. editions of the later novels were retitled to provide descriptive conditions of the corpse:  The Corpse in the Green Pajamas, The Corpse in the Coppice, The Corpse in the Crimson Slippers, The Corpse with the Dirty Face, The Corpse with the Floating Foot, The Corpse with the Blue Cravat, and so on.  The Tolefree books are erudite, well-plotted, and -- if Blistered Hand is representative -- overly talkative and somewhat twee in their attempt to inject some humor (humour).  Critics either loved them or hated them.  Julian Symons thought Walling was a humdrum, while Will Cuppy considered him the dean of mystery writers.  Howard Haycraft thought he was a better mystery writer than John Rhode.  John Dickson Carr praised his sense of misdirection.  Bill Pronzini thought that Walling "elevated dullness to a fine art," and that Tolefree was a twir.  Barry Pike found the stories "courtly" and "replete with mystery, suspense, cross-purposes and strained relations."  Alexander Wollcott and Ogden Nash loved Walling's mysteries.  And, according to Walling's U.S. publisher (who printed some 135,000 copies of his books in the firstr ten years), "Rumor has it that when the Queen of Spain fled from Madrid at the time of the Revolution, she left behind a Walliing story, half finished.  Walling fans still wonder how she could have chosen to take her jewels."

The scene of the murder in The Corpse with the Blistered Hand is a great house in a remote village in the Cotswolds, "built around an ancient chantrey by some 16th-Century new-rich when old rip Henry cleared out the clerics."  It is a hot and sweltering summer in London when Tolefree and Farrar receive an invitation from old friend, Professor of Moral Philosophy, and amateur detective Gregory Pye to join him for a week or so at John Perivale's estate.  Perivale has a beautiful young daughter, Helen, who is madly in love with Bill Kinterbury, a former student of Pye's.  Kinterbury happens to be the son of the skintiest of skintflints on the Cotswolds, Samuel Kinterbury.  For the past two months the village has been graced with the appearance of William Abbott (probably not his real name), who claimed to be an artist and spent each day painting a canvas that allowed hijm a good view of the Albury Chantrey.  The chantrey is owned by Colonel Yeoland, a reclusive man who purchased it after his wife had died several years before.  Yeoland and Abbott have been meeting in secret and plotting...something.  There has been a local rumor that, four hundred years ago, the priory's riches were buried somewhere by the chantrey to avoid seizure by King Henry's men (a story of hidden treasure looms over every old abbey in England, so nobody really believed this particular tale).  Could this supposed treasure be behind the plotting between Abbott and Kinterbury?  Or could it be something else?  While clearing out a clogged chimney in the chantrey, Yeoland came across a brick-up 400-hundred year-old volume of Boethius, which had inserted in it a hand-drawn geometrical figure; legend also had it that a plot to the hoard's location had been drawn up at the time.  Could this be it?  Also lurking about is a sinister oriental figure who appeared around the village at the same time Abbott did, and a retired Captain who was a fish-out-of-water in the small village and his fishier-out-of-water wife.  There's also a sneaky village lad mistrusted by all.  And a naval captain and a London lawyer who are visiting Yeoland; they are actually government agents on the search for a leak of important information.

And, of course, the corpse wih a blistered hand, found in a room in the chantrey where he had been digging up the floor.  The corpse is Abbott, and his head had been bashed in -- but not before he had received a bullet to the brain.

A three-pronged investigtion starts.  Canny Inspector Bleeby is the official in charge of the case and he is trying to determine Abbott's true identity and purpose, as well as a motive for the killing, and any possible accomplices.  Captain Franks and Ronald Greene, the undercover government men, don't think the murder has anything to do with why they were sent to Albury, but can't be too sure.  And Tolefree, Farrar, Pye, Perivale, Helen, and Bill are trying to keep Bill's father's name out of the investigation because...well, Helen and Bill do not want to start their life off together with the shadow of a possible crime by Bill's father hanging over them.

I found the book and the characters a bit overdone.  The by-play between the main characters seemed strained with folksy colloquialisms.  The conversations too wordy.  There's also the casual racism that made Britain (and elsewhere) such a fun place to be, so be warned.  That being said, the bones of this novel are good.  The plotting is first-rate and the clues well-hidden.  I don't know if I'll ever go out of my way to read another Walling, but I probably wouldn't turn one down if given the opportunity.