Big Foot by Edgar WallaceMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Not one of the great Wallace books in the end, because of a couple of cheats, but enjoyable for most of its length.
One of the big cheats/coincidences is the astonishingly mobile tramp with mental issues who manages to move by unexplained means, and for largely unexplained reasons, between the three main locations (central London, a coastal town, and a rural suburb of London), apparently solely so that he can play a key role in the plot. He also has a coincidental connection to another character.
There's a massive red herring which had me completely fooled, not least because there's at least one scene where someone tells someone else something that, given the final resolution, they ought not to have told him. (view spoiler)
There's the usual side romance, between a lawyer and the secretary of the man who has the neighbouring office; it's nothing special.
Still, Superintendent Minter (known to everyone as "Sooper") is a fun character, with his pose of anti-intellectualism covering a clever and insightful mind - a bit like Colombo in a way, pretending to be "just a plain man" while outmaneuvering someone who thinks they're his social and intellectual superior. His disreputable motorcycle is also a bit like Colombo's car, and like his later American counterpart he dresses like a scarecrow. He appeared in at least one other Wallace book, but unfortunately my library doesn't have it and it isn't on Project Gutenberg either.
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