Review: Tragedy at Ravensthorpe

Tragedy at Ravensthorpe by J.J. Connington
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The most unusual thing about this classic mystery series is that the investigator is the Chief Constable, the head of all the police in a county (the county is not named). His inspector, who would normally be the detective, is instead the Watson. Sir Clinton Driffield is the detective's name.

This one is a country-house mystery of sorts, in that it does take place at a country house, and the first crime is committed during a masked ball in honour of the daughter of the house's 21st birthday.

You always have to make allowances, in period mysteries, for something, and here it's Driffield's rather patronising way of protecting the women from distress (they seem perfectly capable to me), and the fact that he smokes no fewer than three cigarettes during his summing-up of the case.

Driffield is a bit of a self-satisfied clever dick, and figures everything out nicely, connecting a number of odd elements into a complete story. He does acknowledge that he doesn't have enough to take to a jury, so he has to try to trap one of the criminals. This, at least, doesn't go quite as planned, though it still leaves him in a good position.

The mystery turns out to be two entangled mysteries, one of which is not that satisfying. (view spoiler)[A man disappears and is found dead. Driffield judges that his brother, who hates him and has just been thrown out of the family home without an income for no great transgression, "isn't the fratricidal type" and that therefore it's suicide. He does have more to his theory, in that the man has agoraphobia, like a number of members of his family - rather to my surprise, there is a genetic component to that particular form of mental illness. But there's no really decisive evidence for suicide versus murder, and the brother had a motive, no alibi, and freely admits to moving the body. In the end, there's no trial for anyone, because the other criminals in the more or less unrelated mystery have all killed each other, the last accidentally killing himself - though he lives long enough to confess and confirm Driffield's cleverness in working out the crime. (hide spoiler)]

While it's a cleverly plotted puzzle, it's not much more than that, so I'm giving it a position in the Bronze tier of my annual recommendation list. If you read a mystery novel in part for the stuff that isn't the mystery, which I do, there isn't a lot of that here; the family dynamics are sketched in enough to provide context and a couple of red herrings, but no more, and the personalities of the characters are similarly adequate. The detective is not particularly colourful or individual, either, more like the crime-solving machines of Freeman Wills Crofts or R. Austin Freeman than a Poirot or a Wimsey. Enjoy this one for the cleverness rather than the human interest.

View all my reviews