If I had had the very slightest premonition when I took that bungalow that I was about to be mixed up in an affair such as that which developed from a certain night in June, I should probably have fled to the ends of the earth--or, at any rate, have remained in my old lodgings at Dover.
The third J. S. Fletcher mystery novel from 1930 that was published in the United States was The South Foreland Murder. I like this book rather better than the first from that year, The Borgia Cabinet, mainly because it feels more "real world." Cabinet was a generic artificial country house mystery but Foreland seems more like something that might really have taken place.
The story is narrated by a Dover solicitor bachelor named Savvery, who has rented a bungalow near the village of St. Margaret at Cliffe, located between Dover and Deal, not far from the South Foreland Lighthouse. It is set explicitly in 1911, three years before the outbreak of the Great War, though the book was published in 1930--a nineteen-year disparity! The Fletcher mysteries from the later Twenties and the Thirties which I have read have all felt decidedly anachronistic to me; perhaps they are all meant to be set in the past, within a few years on either side of the war.
Fletcher was only 57 in 1920, which is hardly, I would say (perhaps defensively), superannuated; but he doesn't seem to have been concerned with keeping up with modern times, making it surprising that he seems unquestionably to have been the most popular "modern" English mystery writer in the United States during the Roaring Twenties.
Perhaps the bulk of Fletcher's anglophiliac reading audience missed the "good old days" before the war, an ostensibly gentler time when autos were still a novelty, less forward women wore big hats and long dresses and gangland slayings seemingly were not a weekly occurrence in Chicago and other perilous urban American citadels.
Another hugely popular English mystery writer during the Jazz Age was the similarly old-fashioned E. Phillips Oppenheim, not to mention the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose detective Sherlock Holmes made his "last bow" on the eve of the Great War, only to take the stage again to solve yet more murder cases, retrospectively set, between 1924 and 1927. It took nothing less than the Grim Reaper Himself finally to put a full stop to the crime writing careers of these Victorian/Edwardian men.
As a group Doyle's last Holmes stories are, truth be told, pretty weak broth compared to those from the glory days, though "The Problem of Thor Bridge" is generally beloved and there's much to be said for the final Holmes tale, "Shoscombe Old Place." Fletcher's later works from the 1930s generally are shorter and weaker than the ones from the late teens and early Twenties. I think Foreland is one of the better ones, however.
To get back to this book (finally), lawyer Savvery's bungalow neighbors are:
Mr. Rennard, a friendly, obvious man of means, "always ready to pass the time of day and to invite you into his bungalow for a whiskey and soda and an uncommonly good cigar."
Mr. and Mrs. Thacker, a "grocer and Italian warehouseman" and his pretty, younger wife, who is "gay, vivacious and something of a chatterbox."
Mr. Chettle, in a cottage a little further away, "a quiet, moony-looking chap," one of those artists.
This sunny setup is soon disturbed when Mr. Rennard one early morning is found shot to death at his bungalow--most efficiently, narratively-speaking, at the end of chapter one. Savvery finds himself at the center of events (the ingenuous police are quite nice about frequently including him in their investigative efforts); there are vanished jewels, a favorite plot contrivance of Fletcher; and, much less typical of the author, at least in my experience, a rather shockingly bloody climax in Monte Carlo (tactfully told at second hand, but still....).
It's the usual Fletcher formula in many ways, including the solution that comes to both the investigators and the readers by happenstance, but it's highly readable, the narrative going down like, one presumes, those whisky and sodas of Rennards. I have to give Fletcher credit: he was good, and supremely efficient, at what he did. As long as you don't expect by the book fair play detection, locked rooms and ingenious clues and the like, you should enjoy it all if you like classic British mysteries.
Was Fletcher really a sort of precursor of the police procedural? Perhaps so, the more I think about it, though admittedly his depiction of police work makes old Freeman Crofts look like Jack Webb or Ed McBain. But, really, while we are revising everything else about there vintage era of mystery, we really should think about beginning to reckon with the "Dean of Mystery Writers," Mr. J. S. Fletcher.
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