A review of Death of Mr Dodsley by John Ferguson – 230218

I had not read any of John Ferguson’s crime fiction before, but the recent reissue of Death of Mr Dodsley, originally published in 1937, as part of the British Library Crime Classics series prompted me to pick up a copy. It is sub-titled a London bibliomystery and is concerned with the murder of a second-hand bookseller, the eponymous Mr Richard Dodsley. Ferguson goes to great pains in the book’ epistolary dedication to point out that his narrative will be fairly clued and, to be fair to him, it is, perhaps too fairly as some readers will champ with impatience as the investigators dawdle towards a resolution. My take on this was perhaps influenced by having just read Brian Flynn’s The Case of the Faithful Heart which uses a similar device.

The best part of the book is the opening chapters. Surprisingly, we start in the Houses of Parliament where MPs are preparing for an important division upon which the Government’s future is at stake. It is a clever device to introduce us to an up-and-coming politician, David Grafton, who is leading the opposition to the bill and, through him, his daughter, Margery, who has just written a crime novel, Death at the Desk, which has been panned by the critics and, to her face, by her boyfriend, Dick Dodsley, the bookseller’s nephew, as being too unrealistic.

The focus then switches to the environs of Charing Cross Road where a rather slow policeman has to deal with a drunken man who detains him with a story of an open door in the street. When free from his limpet-like drunkard PC Roberts finds the door, pushes it open and finds the body of Mr Dodsley who has been shot. The only clues are three discarded cigarette butts, two spent matches, and a straight hair clip. Dodsley had been working late – he was murdered according to his smashed watch at 3.04am – to complete a catalogue of rare books which had to be delivered to the printers the next day. Clearly, someone was waiting for him and had removed some of the books to make a spyhole through the bookshelves to his desk.

Immediate suspicion falls upon the nephew, especially as there had been some rare books stolen during the previous few weeks, which amateur sleuth, Macnab, had been called in to investigate without success. Ferguson has fun in drawing Dodsley’s three assistants, the ambitious but impecunious Carter and two female assistants who have their claws into each other and one of whom is besotted by both the cinema and Dick Dodsley. To add to the mix there are striking similarities to Dodsley’s death and the murder in Margery Grafton’s novel.

Leading the police investigation are Inspector Mallett – yes, another Mallett, an officer sharing the same surname as Mary Fitt’s series detective – and Sergeant Crabb who represent the old and new schools of policing respectively. They make heavy weather of the case, convinced that there were a pair of accomplices, a man and a woman. Macnab, called in to protect Dick’s interests by Margery, fares little better initially but the pace of the book, which has almost slowed to a standstill, picks up as he gets his teeth into the problem.

A lock, a bus ticket, and an overly helpful unhelpful associate move Macnab nearer to the truth. In a scene in which all the suspects are assembled Macnab reveals his reconstruction of what happened that fatal night and reveals the culprit who is promptly arrested. However, there is a further twist in the tale at the end as in a private assignation at the bookshop Macnab hands over some documents to a grateful recipient which explain part of the motivation for a savage and senseless crime.

Margery Grafton’s theory was that murderers always made one mistake. A careless but fatal mistake over a pile of books proved the undoing of Dodsley’s murderer. An enjoyable read, but it was too variable in its quality to be a true classic. Nevertheless, I will look up more of Ferguson’s work.