A review of Cut Throat by Christopher Bush

There is a very different feel about this seventh adventure of Christopher Bush’s amateur sleuth, Ludovic Travers, initially published in 1932 and now reissued by Dean Street Press. There is an altogether darker, broodier, more serious overtone to the story, with the premise of the book anchored on recent political developments, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt on the part of some newspaper editors to form the Empire Free Trade party in a bid to out the then premier, Stanley Baldwin.  

Lord Zyon has recently absorbed Sir William Griffith’s newspaper and has launched his own political campaign, offering free trade with a difference. Travers, an eminent economist, is supplying some advice to his Lordship and is with him to finalise plans for a major political rally at the Royal Albert Hall when his lordship receives an astonishing offer purportedly from Griffith. To illustrate graphically how countries are dumping cheap food in Britain, Griffith is sending a hamper full of the foodstuffs with the intention that it be opened up on stage at the rally. Sensibly, Lord Zyon has the hamper sent to his house and upon opening it, discovers the body of Griffith with his Throat cut.

Travers along with his usual policeman sidekicks, Superintendent Wharton and Chief Inspector Norris, although no Durango’s private investigator, John Franklin, this time, set out to discover how the erstwhile newspaper proprietor met his fate and whodunit. As usual with Bush, it is a complicated and well-thought-out plot and although the culprit may be readily apparent, the trio have a variety of suspects to consider and assess, including Griffith’s lazy, alcoholic nephew, his secretary and his flirty wife, a vicar who behaves suspiciously, and, of course, a butler, not forgetting a newshound with a grievance who has the knack of turning up at the right place.

Although the identity of the culprit is reasonably easy to guess, they have what seems a cast iron alibi which only Travers’ ingenuity and knowledge of physics and mathematics eventually unravels. Murders have to be meticulously thought out to succeed and call for careful planning and accounting for all possibilities. There is an almost Wills Croftian obsession with the precision of timing in this story. Whilst all the elements the reader needs to unpick the alibi are presented to them, so the solution is fair in that sense, I am not sure many will work out the hole in the alibi at the first pass. The book is none the poorer for that, instead allowing the reader to admire Bush’s mastery in creating a fiendish puzzle.

Structurally, the book contains a couple of what Bush terms Short Cuts. These are rather blunt attempts by the police to move the investigation by confronting the suspect. The first ends disastrously, while the second moves the plot along to its conclusion, although it still takes Travers to work it all out.   

There is some humour along the way, not least when Travers takes one for the team by allowing himself to be subjected to the feminine charms of Mrs Bland. This larger-than-life female may not have been everybody’s cup of Lapsang Souchong, but Travers seems to be as uncomfortable with the thought of a dalliance with any female, not just this particular specimen. There are some interesting insights into the sexual mores of the time to be gleaned from reading Golden Age detective fiction.  

Bush is a reliable author, crafting complex, interesting, and entertaining tales that keep the reader enthralled. He does not let us down with Cut Throat.