A review of The Case Of The Michaelmas Goose by Clifford Witting – 231227

One of the three Clifford Witting novels reissued by the enterprising Galileo Publishers in 2023, the Case of the Michaelmas Goose, originally published in 1938, is the third in his Inspector Charlton series. Structurally, it falls into three parts, the lengthy The Goose which is essentially a police procedural as Charlton and his colleagues grapple with the complexities of a death at Etchworth Tower, The Killing which reveals what really did happen and why, and The Golden Eggs which wraps up the tale in a dramatic fashion.

It is perhaps because of this structure that I found this the least satisfactory of Witting’s novels that I had read. It is full of the author’s customary wit and he has assembled a strong and interesting cast of characters, but the way that he has put the tale together with a long and languid opening and a quick fire, very thrilling ending just did not quite work for me.

I like to think that I can piece together the who, what and why from the clues casually dropped into the text, but to have read almost two hundred pages and be almost none the wiser save for realising that there was a change of identity somewhere in the tower, that there was a visitor unaccounted for, and that the murder could not have been done at the tower, only to have the game given away without any compunction in the middle section and the police catching up because of an unforced confession was more than a little unsatisfactory. That sense of disappointment was more than made up by the dramatic denouement where one of the baddies goes down with all guns blazing.

Etchworth Tower, a kind of folly built by the fourth Duke of Redbourn up on High Down, is a local tourist attraction. When the old gatekeeper, Tom Lee, turns up for duty on Sunday, September 29^th, he discovers a body of a man wearing a false beard at the foot of the tower. He is later identified as Courtenay Harbord, a young man who is sponging off his aunt but was his death suicide or murder?

Charlton could do with a spreadsheet as he painfully, with the aid of newspaper and radio advertisements, sets out to identify all the visitors to the tower and produce a timetable of their departures around the time that Harbord was spotted at the attraction. The result, a complicated table which is reproduced in full would have been given Freeman Wills Crofts’ imprimatur, reveals tat he can account for 105 of the 106 visitors.

The finger of suspicion is pointed towards Peter Grey, the son of Courtney’s aunt whom Charlton is forced to arrest after a dramatic and unscheduled intervention by the jury at the coroner’s inquest. One thing he is certain of in a perplexing case is that Peter is not the culprit, a feeling that is perhaps prejudiced because he is falling in love with his sister, Judy, and he vows to clear his name. There is no sense of conflict of interest here!

It turns out to be a case of money counterfeiting, two hardened criminals, not unknown to the police, luring spendthrift and impecunious young men into their web of intrigue, and the inevitable repercussions of gang members falling out. Two of the fake notes had already been spotted some time ago and Charlton had investigated them with no result. However, all of this seems to be pulled out of thin air, a piece of legerdemain on Witting’s part that no reader could really second guess. The reader’s perplexity is heightened by the fact that gang members, who are identified by their real names, correspond to characters seemingly masquerading in quiet respectability, whom we met under different identities in the first part. I almost had to create a spreadsheet myself!

Nevertheless, whilst it might have been unsatisfactory as a murder mystery, inverted or otherwise, there is much to admire in what is a witty and entertaining story. A stroke of genius was to include the original illustrations in the reissue. Well done, Galileo Publishers!