
Recently I had the great pleasure of reading and reviewing Martin Edwards' The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books for Shiny New Books (you can see that review here). In my review I said I'd already ordered a couple of books he recommended, and this was one of them. Apparently it was once described as being one of the ten finest detective stories ever written. Not something I feel in a position to agree or disagree with, but it certainly is a cracker of a novel, highly readable, fascinating, and full of surprises.
In Martin Edwards' book he discusses this novel, which was published in 1931, in a chapter called 'Multiple Murders' - serial killers, in other words. There's a body count of no less than six here, innocent-seeming, pleasant, harmless sort of folk who live in the Norfolk village of Eastrepps. Also living in the village is a businessman, Robert Eldridge. As the story begins, we meet him on a train down from London, where he keeps an office and has a hotel room. But Eldridge has a secret - more than one, in fact. What preoccupies him entirely at the moment is his illicit affair with a beautiful married woman, Margaret, who also lives in the village. Margaret can't let her husband divorce her, as she would lose custody of her beloved daughter, so Eldridge has worked out a scheme whereby he returns from London a day early and surreptitiously spends the night with Margaret, making his way to the station next morning and exiting with the incoming commuters from London.
But this is not Eldridge's only secret. He is in fact James Selby, a notoriously crooked financier, whose Anaconda scheme robbed numerous undeserving people of their life savings. He was forced to flee the country, lived in South America for some years, and has only been able to return to England by means of taking on a fake identity. Although he's extremely rich, he's never compensated his victims, several of whom live in Eastrepps, and are, indeed, among the victims of the Eastrepps Evil, as the killer comes to be known.
The local police are out of their depth, or so at least is the plodding Inspector Protheroe - luckily he has a sidekick, sharp-minded Sergeant Ruddock, and Chief Inspector Wilkins comes down from Scotland Yard to join the investigation. Their first conclusion, owing to the apparently arbitrary choice of victims, is that there must be a madman at work, and a likely suspect soon appears. But, though batty as a fruitcake, with some very peculiar habits, the person concerned turns out to be innocent and has to be released. Finally some evidence turns up which seems to point irrevocably at one person, and the law takes its course. But have the police got the right man?
There's so much to love and admire here. There's plenty of misdirection to satisfy people who love that sort of thing (and what reader of crime novels doesn't?), there's police procedure, something many of us enjoy, a satisfying section detailing the court case to please those who love legal thrillers, and of course a very surprising and completely unexpected twist towards the end.The writing is strong and lively, and the characters vivid and believable - I was impressed by how difficult it is to truly despise Robert Eldridge despite the fact that he's an out and out crook. Of course having been written in 1931 the novel has the usual period appeal that lovers of golden age fiction come to expect, but in other ways it reads in an entirely fresh and contemporary way.
If you've never heard of Francis Beeding, it's not really surprising as his novels are no longer in print. He was actually two people - a pseudonym adopted by John Leslie Palmer and Hilary St George Saunders. Their output ('regrettably infrequent' says Martin Edwards) includes one novel that formed the basis for Hitchcock's film Spellbound. You might have to search around for an affordable copy of Death Walks in Eastrepps but it's well worth it.