The Three Corpse Trick by Miles Burton

Goose Common, a village outside of Deaning, the county town of Deanshire, apparently, is a peaceful place, just like any other in a Golden Age murder mystery. Nothing much every really happens there –  the most excitement that happens on June 7^th is Wendy Burge going house to house to make her regular collection for the County Hospital. Things pick up the next day when her body is found floating in the nearby river.

As Inspector Arnold and his sleuthing chum Desmond Merrion investigate, it seems that Goose Common, for some reason, has a number of professional villains lurking around. But why would any of them kill a middle-aged woman – surely not for her collecting tin? But when a second body surfaces – literally – it seems that there is more going on in the formerly sleepy village than anyone suspected…

The thirtieth Desmond Merrion mystery from the pen of Miles Burton, the other pseudonym of Cecil John Street aka John Rhode, was published in 1944. This is in itself interesting as the setting of this one is post-war England… thank goodness D-Day worked out. Desmond Merrion, in the preceding books, had been working for Naval Intelligence, but now has been discharged, and basically jumps on the first opportunity to accompany Arnold on a murder investigation.

The tale focuses on Merrion’s investigations as he jumps from theory to theory, rather than Arnold who convinces himself early on who the murderer is (wrongly, obviously) and basically hunts around for evidence, leaving Merrion to get on with things by himself. It’s an interesting reversal from the Rhode Priestley tales where Waghorn or Hanslet will follow the same sort of investigation only for Dr Priestley to pull everything together. Here, Merrion sorts it out for himself, but it only clicks at the last minute for him. It’s an interesting approach, as after a genuine surprise at the end of the penultimate chapter, everything falls into place, but it becomes evident that even our supersleuth has been looking in the wrong direction for most of the tale.

It’s a great tale, this one, on a par with Murder M.D., my favourite of the Burton tales so far. While this does bog down just a little in the middle third, it is still a very strong example of the Golden Age mystery, with one of the best Street surprises that I’ve encountered so far. There’s a couple of dated racial references – Merrion and Arnold don’t have a high opinion of Spaniards – a Spaniard is “just the sort of person one might expect to carry a knife” – or the Irish, and let’s not start on the traveller community – or “diddykaies”, a word so obscure, Google doesn’t think it exists… But ignore them as a sin of the times –  this one is Highly Recommended. You just need to raise £40 to get a copy… unless the British Library wants to revisit Burton and republish this one…