Review: The Layton Court Mystery

The Layton Court Mystery by Anthony Berkeley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This started out feeling like a very standard 1920s detective mystery. Country house party, body of host found in library, locked from the inside, apparent suicide... but is it? Cast of characters includes gruff military man, attractive young woman, snooty aristocratic lady, etc.

As it unfolded, I wondered, "Is the point of difference that the amateur detective is an idiot?" He keeps misinterpreting things in a Watson-like way, even being misled into suspecting a "man" who, to me, was obviously an animal of some kind - I initially thought a dog, but it turned out to be a bull - mentioned in a letter he finds in a rubbish heap. He's always completely confident of his wrong theories, too. Along with this misplaced confidence goes an arrogant assumption that he should be the one to make the call on whether the whole thing gets handed over to the police, based on who the victim was, who the murderer was, and the circumstances. A professional police detective, on the other hand, would be duty bound to pursue the cause of impartial justice, on the grounds that it's not up to a random individual to decide whether this crime or that crime is "justified"; it's up to society as a whole, operating through the police, the courts, and the jury system, to enforce the law that says that it's also not up to a random individual to decide who lives and who dies. That arrogance annoyed me, and was all of a piece with something that nevertheless startled me: a nasty piece of antisemitic sentiment apropos of nothing in the middle of the book. (The narration says something to the effect that the only thing the amateur detective hated more than tapioca and prunes, which is what he was eating for dessert, was Jews.)

And then at the end we get the twist, which I didn't see coming; I'd had it in mind as one possibility among many, but didn't see it as a particularly strong one. The author says in his foreword that he set out to play absolutely "fair" with the reader and not keep back any clues, but he doesn't quite deliver that; there's a bit of knowledge that he has relating to lattice windows, and another opportunity to observe footprints in a flowerbed, that are key clues which, if the reader's attention was drawn to them, would give away the ending, and those are withheld until the final setting out of the solution.

(view spoiler)[Also, the butler is never treated as a serious suspect, even though the murderer was a large, strong man and the butler is a large, strong man who shows no regret at his employer's passing and later is revealed to have had good reason to want him dead. The matter's just never discussed, and I have to suspect that it's because there was really no strong evidence against him being the murderer, but the author didn't want to take it in that direction. After all, "the butler did it" is such a cliché. Or perhaps he was dismissed without discussion because he was an ex-boxer and therefore, in the author/main character's prejudiced view, not smart enough to have cleaned up the crime scene? (hide spoiler)]

In several ways, then, this one was unsatisfactory to me. An arrogant, blundering detective with a distorted sense of justice; a cheat where we'd been promised no cheating; and that antisemitic sentiment out of nowhere took it down to three stars in the end.

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