Review: The Viaduct Murder

The Viaduct Murder by Ronald Knox
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Clever, but disappointing. The exact reason needs to be in spoiler tags, but, being as vague as possible: it frustrates the usual expectations of the genre. I think it's still worth reading, if you're interested in how genre books, and particularly mystery books, work (or potentially fail to work), but if you're wanting entertainment only, I don't recommend it.

Also, there's an intrusive omniscient narrator who has Opinions about how all of the characters are some sort of inadequate human being, about Society, and (at some length through the mouth of one of the characters, in a chapter that's marked as optional) about various issues of the day. These are the opinions of quite a conservative Catholic priest in 1925, so... be advised.

The amateur detective is a man who during World War I wasn't fit for active service, and instead got a minor clerical job in Military Intelligence, which he habitually overplays to imply he was some sort of operative. He conceived a contempt for the police, because they seldom followed up on the matters he passed on to them, so he thinks he can do better than the police at solving a murder that has occurred on the grounds of the golf club where he lives. He has no particular occupation; his friends are a vicar who thinks more about golf than faith (to the overt disapproval of the narrator, naturally), a retired professor who's an ever-flowing font of useless information and whom his friends mostly ignore, and a third man who's on a golfing holiday, is an old friend of the would-be detective's, and slips into the role of Watson.

The following really is a spoiler: (view spoiler)[We're reminded several times that the amateurs shouldn't be doing what they're doing, but should leave the catching of criminals to the police, and that's reinforced in a particularly obvious way when the amateur detective, Reeves, gets absolutely everything wrong, including setting out to exonerate the murderer in the belief that he's innocent; the police, who are barely characters in the book, solve the case abruptly offstage; and Gordon, the Watson, writes a summary for Reeves at the end which explains all of the odd features that seemed like vital clues as just meaningless coincidences. The author effectively red-herrings the reader a couple of times; I was convinced that the murderer and the victim were the same man, since they were never seen together, and was surprised at how early the retired academic came to the same conclusion, but it was a mistake. I was also convinced at one point that the victim's ex-wife was the murderer and her admirer was covering for her, but apparently not. (hide spoiler)]

The process is the familiar process of a detective novel: gathering clues, forming theories, laying traps for the murderer. There's even a chase after a fleeing suspect. It has all of the machinery of a classic detective story, right up to the end, but then that machinery slips a gear and grinds to a disappointing halt. It reminds me of a science-fiction story I read in which the characters are working desperately throughout to avert a planetary disaster, and then they... don't.

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