A review of Missing or Murdered by Robin Forsythe – 230829

A clerk working at Somerset House in London, Robin Forsythe was arrested for theft and fraud in 1928 and sentenced to fifteen months in prison. During his period of confinement at His Majesty’s pleasure, he began to write crime fiction and shortly after his release his first novel, Missing or Murdered, featuring amateur sleuth Algernon Vereker was published in 1929. It has been rescued from obscurity by Dean Street Press.

Forsythe cannot resist the opportunity to share his insights into the workings of the civil service, which one of his characters regards as full of a lot of people who are well paid for doing very little with the temptation of being able to commit fraud. There is nothing like drawing from your own experience to give your novel a sense of realism. Although very much of its time with its language sometimes verging into floridity, it is nonetheless entertaining enough.

As for the murder mystery itself, the person who is either missing or murdered is Lord Bygrave, a cabinet minister, whose executor Vereker is. Indeed, the question of precisely what has happened to the missing peer is one that Forsythe sustains with some skill until the last knockings of the book, the investigators at times thinking that he has gone to meet his Maker and at others he is just missing, possibly even because he himself has committed a crime. For fans of fair clueing, while most of the information needed to get somewhere near the solution is unearthed during the investigations, the resolution of the affair relies upon a revelation from a femme fatale, whose charms captivate the amateur sleuth, and an alliance which appears almost out of the blue.

One of the key features of the story is that most of the characters are not quite who they appear to be and seem to take a perverse delight in telling versions of events that only add to the confusion rather than clarify. As a result, Forsythe can not only maintain the suspense about what happened to his Lordship but also draw in a wide range of suspects, none of whom can be conclusively jettisoned until the end.

The highlight of the book for me was the relationship between Vereker and Inspector Heather of the Yard, who swap notes amiably enough but are both fired with a competitive streak to reach the solution before the other, a liaison that foreshadows the often bumpy partnership of Christopher Bush’s Travers and Wharton. Each time the pair meet to compare notes, Vereker is convinced he has got one over the professional detective, only to find that Heather has come to much the same conclusion. That both are wrong most of the time adds to the intrigue of the mystery and the charm of the book. Ultimately, in good Golden Age detective fiction, the amateur gets there first, but only just, to claim the sovereign that has been staked in a wager.

The book is not without humour. Both Vereker and Heather appear at one of their regular catchups sporting bandages around their heads, both having been assaulted in the same house an hour between each other. Vereker’s attempts at feigning a disguise are comic as are his friend Ricardo’s expensive and almost catastrophic attempts to follow a suspect.  

A body is discovered right at the end of a tale that involves an early, ill-considered marriage, bigamy, and blackmail, and, while the culprits know their game is up, they chose to end their lives. In the process, the world is deprived of a study on the history of etchings, our loss, I’m sure.

I will be interested to see whether Forsythe developed on the promise he showed in this rather impressive debut.