Bringing Down the Hammer: Crack of Doom (1963), by Leo Bruce

....An ordinary, well-used very heavy hammer such as may be used for anything from breaking coal to driving in a stake.  Such a one I have kept by me for years.  No one knows I have it. It is small enough to carry with me unnoticeably and large enough to be effective....
                                                                  Crack of Doom (1963), by Leo Bruce

Rich Westwood of Past Offences suggested that crime fiction bloggers review a 1963 mystery this month.  Here is my choice: Leo Bruce's Crack of Doom.

In the 1950s and 1960s, one of the best English authors of the clued detective novel was "Leo Bruce," the pseudonym of prolific author Rupert Croft-Cooke (1903-1979).  

Rupert Croft-Cooke

Many of his Leo Bruce novels are in print today, Croft-Cooke's native Indian secretary and companion, Joseph Susei Mari, having inherited the copyrights to the Leo Bruce novels at the author's death and sold them to the publishing firm of Academy Chicago, which was absorbed by Chicago Review Press last year.

In the fall of this year, CRP will be reprinting the last Leo Bruce detective novel, Death of a Bovver Boy, which was originally published in 1974, five years before Bruce's death (Croft-Cooke suffered a debilitating stroke that year and afterwards was only able to complete one more work, his final volume of memoirs).

I have blogged about Croft-Cooke here and here, so will not go once again into a great deal of background on him, but I should note that there are two Leo Bruce novels series, one with the earthy British copper (later PI) Sergeant Beef (8 novels, published between 1936 and 1952, including the indisputable Bruce classic, Case for Three Detectives, 1936) and one with the history schoolmaster (Queen's School, Newminster) and amateur sleuth Carolus Deene (23 novels, published between 1955 and 1974).

The Beef books were conceived as satires on classical detective fiction, particularly the "gentleman sleuth" type (Beef is no gentleman), but they also simultaneously offer cleverly designed puzzles.  The Deene books are less overtly satirical (though the earlier ones especially have considerable humor), with Deene himself being a gentleman detective (private income, you see), but they also often have very good puzzles.  The Deene novels Furious Old Women (1960), A Bone and a Hank of Hair (1961) and Nothing Like Blood (1962) have especially clever plots, I think, but most of the books are quite good.

By and large the Deene mysteries are set in the same sort of provincial English milieu so often favored by Agatha Christie.  Bruce also is, like Christie, particularly adept at subtle clueing.  Personally I find him one of the English mystery writers who comes closest to Christie overall, including in sheer readability.

the English first edition
with the splendid dust jacket by Val Biro

Leo Bruce's Crack of Doom (retitled, for no compelling reason that I can see, Such is Death in the United States) inaugurated a period of lessened levity in the Deene books.  Its plot is rather grim.

The opening pages of the novel are taken from the diary of an aspiring murderer in the resort town of Selby-on-Sea. This person discloses therein that s/he is planning to commit, for the sheer thrill of it, the perfect murder: one that is without motive ("I shall simply kill the first person who comes along").

The body of the novel then commences, with a man being found dead in a shelter on the Selby-on-Sea promenade, his head battered by blows from a coal hammer, on a blustery night a few weeks before Christmas (yes, Crack of Doom is also a Christmas mystery, with events coming to a head on Christmas Day, which echoes the "Day of Judgment" idea invoked by the novel's title).

The dead man is Ernest Rafter, who, it turns out, had only recently returned to England. He had long been presumed dead, killed in Burma in the Second World War.  Investigation by the police reveals that during the war he had been a collaborator with the Japanese, and in this fact the police believe they may have found the motive for his murder.

Fearing suspicion is directed at her family--Rafter has two brothers and two sisters living in the vicinity of Selby-on-Sea--one of Rafter's sisters, a wealthy, pompous widow with a son at Queen's School in Newminster, persuades Carolus Deene to take on the case.

Bruce's regular cast of amusing supporting characters in Newminster is downplayed in Crack of Doom, but as is so often the case in the Deene books a public house plays a key role in the tale and there are two winning barmaids, Doris and Vivienne, to brighten things up a bit (when it comes to female characters, Bruce excelled at barmaids, stuffy matrons and plainspoken elderly women).

The novel offers a difficult murder problem, with some very good clues, that really tests the murder mettle of Deene and the reader (by the by, Queen's School splendid windbag headmaster Mr. Gorringer shows up for Deene's exposition at the end, as per tradition). The coal hammer as a macabre murder weapon has always stuck with me, rather like the sugar cutter in Agatha Christie's Mrs. McGinty's Dead (1952).

I unhesitatingly recommended Crack of Doom to fans of classic English mystery.