Review: The Man with the Club Foot

The Man with the Club Foot by Valentine Williams
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

There's "plot relies on coincidence" - often the case with early-20th-century books - and then there's whatever this is. Pantheon ex machina? Basically, the author keeps creating incredibly lucky encounters for his hero to get him into the next stage of the plot, though to be fair he does go through some suffering (mostly of the "have to endure discomfort" sort), and occasionally solves his own problems by taking courageous, though seldom particularly intelligent, action.

Spoilers below, which I haven't tagged. I'm not going to recommend reading it, and the spoilers reveal why. I was alerted to the book's existence by a mention in Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime , where her characters Tommy and Tuppence take on the methods of various fictional detectives of the time; I'm not sure why they bothered with this guy.

The protagonist and narrator, Desmond Okewood, has been put on medical leave from the army during World War I with a head injury and "shell shock" (what we would call PTSD). Neither of these seem to hinder him much in his adventures (like whatever Hastings' unspecified injury was in The Mysterious Affair at Styles ) - unless the head injury is why he's such an idiot - but they account for the fact that he is at a loose end and able to follow up a cryptic clue to the whereabouts of his brother, who is "in the intelligence" and seems to have vanished somewhere in Berlin.

Of course, a young English officer without intelligence training or support would have no chance of getting to Berlin during the First World War, right?

Except that in Rotterdam, where he's gone to follow up the clue and can't get a hotel room on a rainy night because he's bad at planning ahead, he speaks in German for no particular reason (he and his brother both happen to speak fluent German with no English accent) to a hotel porter. The porter, who happens to be German, thinks he's German too, and directs him to a hotel run by Germans. There, an American man who is also a member of the German secret police (with a badge in his effects to prove it) happens to die of natural causes right outside our hero's room, and conveniently happens to resemble Desmond closely enough that Desmond can use his papers to get to Berlin. The badge comes in handy too a couple of times, until he carelessly loses it. The American was also carrying half of a letter, which is the book's McGuffin.

He has to make a daring escape from the hotel to avoid an interview with someone who has met the man he's impersonating, and goes to the railway station. There, a British undercover agent conveniently happens to notice before any of the numerous German agents there that he's wearing a British regimental tie (because idiot), and helps him to avoid people searching for him by a mechanism I didn't quite follow, and get on the train to Berlin. Before he does so, he stashes the half of the McGuffin in left luggage and posts the ticket to a friend in England (showing some sense, at least).

In Berlin, he goes through a series of adventures, including meeting the Kaiser (whose many personal faults he enumerates, in the expected manner of a British person during WW I), slips out of the palace and goes to a hotel before anyone can tumble to the fact that he isn't who he says he is.

At the hotel, he's coincidentally discovered by someone he'd met before at a stop on the journey, who was already rightly suspicious (since when he speaks English he does so with an English accent, even though he's meant to be American). This man takes him to see the villain and title character, who has the other half of the McGuffin. Desmond knocks him out - fortunately the stone windowsill was loose and could be used as an improvised and unexpected weapon - and flees with McGuffin part 2, but how will he escape? Well, he very conveniently happens to bump into a woman who was his neighbour (and his brother's love interest) growing up, and is now married to, though living separately from, a senior German official - she's one of the very few people in the part of the hotel he flees to, where she happens to have left a party to visit a friend in the middle of the night, and has coincidentally just emerged into the corridor when he gets there - and she helps him get out of the hotel and gives him a place to stay.

At this point, I was still reading mainly because I wanted to see how much more ridiculous it could get. Actually, though, that was the peak of the silliness. The lady helps him escape, he has numerous vicissitudes, reconnects with his brother, re-encounters the man with the clubfoot, and (mainly through his brother's cleverness rather than his own) they manage to get away. There's really only one more fortunate coincidence, when they happen across an escaped British POW in the forest who can conveniently sacrifice himself as a distraction so that they can get across the German frontier. He's a lower-class man with a heavy regional accent, so this is his natural role, of course.

The whole thing is extremely silly and contrived, and although there are some decent scenes of suspense and conflict, they don't make up for the shonky way the plot has been knocked together to compensate for the fact that the protagonist couldn't plan a cat fight if you handed him two cats and a small sack. It's also, of course, heavy-handedly propagandistic in its condemnation of the faults of the awful Germans; living among them long enough to have learned their language fluently doesn't seem to have endeared them to him, and he depicts them as having no positive features whatsoever.

There were several sequels, but I don't think I'll bother with them. Of course, sometimes a first-time author manages to correct their faults in later books - I've seen it several times - but this is a terrible start, and given that the author now languishes in probably-deserved obscurity, I'm not eager to pick up the next volume.

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