Review: The Bittermeads Mystery

The Bittermeads Mystery by E.R. Punshon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The story opens with a man who's amazingly strong, stealthy (despite being large and apparently ungainly), alert, and an excellent tracker. He feels more like a larger-than-life pulp hero than the protagonist of a detective novel, and indeed this is less a detective novel than it is a thriller. The difference between the two often comes down to time orientation: the detective novel is about solving a crime in the past, and the thriller is frequently about preventing a crime in the future. Not that the main character does a particularly wonderful job of that, at least for the first half of the book. He's busy gaining the trust of one of the criminals, falling for the love interest while trying to work out if she was complicit in the murder of his old friend, and maintaining his undercover identity. There has been more than one murder, but it's not really a mystery who committed them; the trick is getting to a point where he can prove it and foil the villain's plans.

It's only around the middle of the book that we discover exactly who he is and get at least some idea of what he's trying to do and why (I guessed it before the reveal, but not a long time before). About two-thirds of the way in, I, but not he, figured out who the mysterious figure behind the crimes was; the main character is notable for his physical rather than his mental aptitude. I was never in any danger of being bored, though; the tension is well maintained, in part by keeping information unrevealed as long as possible. And then there's a race against time to save multiple people in different places, where seconds could count.

The style, particularly at the start, is excitable and overdramatic, again more like a pulp adventure novel than the urbane narration I'm used to in classic detective stories.

The author isn't good with commas, using them to splice sentences together, placing them incorrectly in sentences or leaving them out where they're needed, and not using them when he splits a sentence of dialog in two parts with a tag; he punctuates the second part, incorrectly, as if it was a stand-alone sentence. Today's authors do this kind of thing all the time, but a century ago it was less common, and publishers generally had better editors, who knew the rules even if the authors didn't.

Between the not-too-bright protagonist, the pulpy prose and the mediocre copy editing, I can't give it better than a Bronze-tier rating in my annual recommendation list, but if you ignore those things, it's exciting and full of tension and, at times, action-packed.

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