This was a quaint old-school murder mystery from 1935. It features an Inspector Bisgwell who seems to come up with his theories a bit precipitously and an amateur detective, the Vicar Dodd, who up to this point has only solved murder mysteries in books (the thrillers of the day) through his library buddy-reads with his friend, the Doctor Pendrill. I mention this mostly because it sets the book off on a note of camaraderie over shared mysteries and we have a series of murder-theory conversations between pairs of characters throughout. Plus the idea that the vicar and the doctor of a village would have a weekly dinner and book club meeting to discuss mystery novels was very cute.
Part of what made this book interesting was that we started off with a very narrow window in which the murder occurred and it kept getting narrower and narrower until it was just a few minutes. I did have trouble picturing the environs of the murder scene, though, and I’m still not entirely sure I can picture what happened properly. I was actually thinking that it might work better as a TV adaptation because then you’d actually be able to see what they were talking about and see that it would actually work. I think I may have finally succeeded in working out the angles, but I’m not certain of it.
Regardless, the trail of evidence was fun to follow, and we get to see the vicar go all CSI with a ball of string. We also have a scene where the Inspector arrives with a constable somewhere to look for evidence and finds the vicar already wandering around with a flashlight with the same intention.
And since I don’t recall encountering the second proverb, I’ll include an exchange between the Inspector and the vicar from p 249:
“Great minds think alike, eh, sir?”
“Or conversely, Inspector—fools seldom differ. It’s curious how these old proverbs cancel each other out with such charming inconsequence.”
I’m counting this one as the “It was a dark and stormy night” square for the Halloween Bingo because the murder occurred during a storm at night (late evening), and the storm was a key aspect of the murder.