A review of The Fatal Five Minutes by R A J Walling – 231216

This is the first book by Robert Walling that I have read and published in 1932 introduces his amateur sleuth, Philip Tolefree, for the first of ultimately twenty-four adventures running though to 1949. It can be fairly described as almost an impossible mystery where the crime, the bludgeoning to death of Wellington Burnet with a candlestick, takes place within a time gap of five minutes, although no one seems to have heard anything, there is no weapon to be found, and it is not clear how the culprit left the room. As any seasoned reader of detective fiction will know, crimes are committed in a universe where the concept of time is elastic.

The set up for the story is fairly conventional in that it features a relatively wealthy businessman, Wellington Burnet, who has fallen for and married a younger woman, a move he has come to regret. There is a house party to which a variety of people are invited including a leading KC and a theatrical director. Tolefree, who works in insurance and does a bit of rooting out of deception and embezzlement on the side, has been invited down by a worried Burnet but has been asked to go incognito. His cover is almost immediately blown as one of the other guests is Farrar, Burnet’s oldest friend and fellow broker. Farrar acts as Tolefree’s Dr Watson and narrates the story as they try to solve who killed their host and why.

One of the interesting features of the book is the relationship between Tolefree and the police investigator, Inspector Catterick. The two never officially join forces nor work against each other, but their investigations go along parallel lines with the policeman being the more dramatic and flashier than the quieter, unassuming but determined amateur. At the end Catterick is content to give Tolefree his head to flush out the truth.

There are moments of high drama, not least Elford’s dramatic exit, during the resumed coroner’s inquest into the death of Burnet, and Tolefree’s verbal reconstruction in an attempt to flush out the culprit who in the end prefers the taste of veronal to the hemp jig, and much creeping along corridors at night. However, much of the book adopts a slower pace, content to meander along a number of paths before the pieces begin to fit together. Walling’s style, in comparison with other writers in the 1930s, seems a tad old-fashioned and his choice of using a narrator means that some of the breakthroughs that Tolefree makes on his own initiative happen off stage and do not receive the detailed treatment they deserve.

Nevertheless, it is an interesting enough puzzle to keep the reader entertained and the solution is ingenious. There are two plausible sets of suspects and Walling does well in keeping the various possibilities in play until the end. Blackmail, marital infidelities and hidden identities are at the centre of a tale which has spurred me on to read more of Walling this year. My TBR pile is groaning!