The 1930 Club seemed like a great opportunity to take a look at my British Library Crime Classics shelves, which are overflowing with books I’ve not yet read. When they started republishing these intriguing detective novels in beautiful editions, I wanted to get them all. I still want to, if I’m honest, but they stepped up how many they were publishing and I realised it wasn’t very realistic. Still. Plenty there.
And one of them was The Secret of High Eldersham by Miles Burton, reprinted in 2016 and thus maybe one of the earlier reprints. Certainly Martin Edwards’ introduction makes it sound like one of the books he was keenest on getting out to a new public.
High Eldersham is a small and out-of-the-way village. The beautiful cover doesn’t strictly relate to any of the houses in the book, but there are a couple of larger ones – lived in respectively by a doctor and a landowner. Otherwise it’s mostly farm labourers and others that Burton doesn’t seem very interested in telling us about. And there’s a pub about a mile from the village proper, and not on the way to anywhere else. It hasn’t been very profitable for quite a while, because of its distance from anywhere, and the novel starts with the landlord Dunsford asking the brewery owner if he can be moved to a different pub nearby. Off Dunsford goes, with a warning that it might be difficult for the new landlord – not only because of the lack of profit, but because the villagers in High Eldersham are not very accepting of outsiders. Indeed, it almost seems as if ‘foreigners’ – those not born in the village – are cursed when they arrive…
Still, a retired policeman called Whitehead becomes the landlord, and we fast forward a few years. Turns out newbies aren’t very lucky, because he gets stabbed to death. The local policeman feels very ill-equipped to deal with any of this, since he usually just sorts out drunk and disorderlies, and others are brought in. I got a bit confused with who all the police who came are, but the important one is Desmond Merrion – an amateur detective, but with close ties to one of the detectives. And, in turns out, a coincidental relationship with a villager – and a prospective relationship with another…
I spent a while trying to decide whether to include spoilers in this post, and have chosen not to. The thing I was going to write about happens relatively early in the book, and you spend the rest of the novel trying to determine whether or not it actually happened… it plays on themes that were quite big at the time, but also atavistic.
That’s all I’ll say on that, but it is the dominant thread of the novel – and one that makes it an interesting and unusual book to read, but also which separates it from the more down-to-earth books of the Golden Age. Merrion went on to appear in dozens and dozens of other books, and I’d be interested to see how he fares as a detective in more traditional mysteries.
As it is, this one relies heavily on coincidence, and the plotting and detection can be a bit clumsy – but I did read a review that said it was more like a thriller than a detective novel, and I think that’s a good point. What Burton lacks in terms of intricate plotting he makes up for in suspense and excitement – and some engaging distortion of a village idyll. It rattles along and is probably rather sillier than the author intended, but certainly good fun for this year’s club.