Read The Lake District Murder (British Library Crime Classics) Online
Authors: John Bude
The Lake District Murder (British Library Crime Classics)
This edition published in 2014 by
The British Library
96 Euston Road
London NW1 2DB
Originally published in London in 1935 by Skeffington & Son
Introduction © Martin Edwards 2014
Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library
ISBN 978 0 7123 6316 7
Typeset by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
III.
THE PUZZLE OF THE HOSE-PIPE
V.
MOTIVE?
VIII.
PRINCE AND BETTLE EXPLAIN
IX.
INVESTIGATIONS AT THE LOTHWAITE
XII.
FRAUD?
XIII.
MEREDITH SETS HIS SCHEME IN MOTION
XIV.
THE QUART IN THE PINT POT!
XV.
THE INSPECTOR OF WEIGHTS AND MEASURES
XVII.
THE MUSLIN BAG
XVIII.
MEREDITH GOES TO EARTH
XIX.
PIPES
XX.
“THE ADMIRAL”
XXI.
RECONSTRUCTION OF THE CRIME
XXII.
CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE
XXIII.
THE LAST ROUND-UP
INTRODUCTION
MARTIN EDWARDS
John Bude was quick to follow up his enjoyable debut mystery novel,
The Cornish Coast Murder
. In the very same year, 1935, Skeffington also published
The Lake District Murder
. The titles of his first two books indicate that Bude had hit on the idea of setting stories in attractive areas of Britain, in the hope that the background would appeal to readers as well as the murder mystery plots. This is a shrewd marketing ploy, but has no chance of success if the author lacks a genuine feel for the location. Fortunately, Bude not only knew but clearly loved his Lake District.
The story opens one March evening, with a farmer finding a man’s body in a car outside the Derwent garage on an isolated road in the Northern Lakes. The macabre discovery is reported to Inspector Meredith, and at first glance, the evidence at the crime scene suggests that Jack Clayton has committed suicide. The seasoned mystery fan does not, of course, need to rely on the giveaway clue in the book’s title to realise that all is not as it seems. It soon emerges that Clayton had no reason to do away with himself. He had been in good spirits, and was engaged to be married to an attractive and likeable young woman called Lily Reade. When Meredith discovers that Clayton was planning to move abroad, and that he had much more money in his bank account than would be generated by a half-share in the profits of a wayside garage, the plot begins to thicken. But if Clayton has been murdered, what could be the motive?
In his first novel, Bude had counterpointed the police investigation with some amateur sleuthing, but here the focus is from start to finish on Meredith’s patient and relentless quest to uncover the truth: ‘Whatever faults may be attributed to the British police force by the American or continental critics, a lack of thoroughness is not one of them’.
The emphasis is not on whodunit, but on how to prove it. Today, because of the phenomenal success of Agatha Christie, there is a widespread assumption that Thirties detective fiction was invariably set in country houses or picturesque villages like Jane Marple’s St Mary Mead. In fact, crime novelists of the time adopted a range of approaches, and Bude’s method here is firmly in the school of Freeman Wills Crofts.
Crofts (1879–1957) was, at the height of his fame, regarded by many as Christie’s equal or superior, and T. S. Eliot, a detective-story fan and occasional critic, was among those who extolled his virtues. Starting with the hugely popular and highly influential
The Cask
in 1920, Crofts specialised in meticulous accounts of painstaking police work, in which the plot often pivoted on the detective’s attempts to destroy an apparently unbreakable alibi. The care which Crofts lavished on story construction impressed readers and fellow authors alike, and he had a number of notable disciples, including Henry Wade and G. D. H. Cole. Here, John Bude produces a book of which Crofts would have been proud.
Meredith is neither an eccentric genius nor any sort of maverick. He is tactful and a team player, an ordinary, hard-working professional, with a long-suffering wife and eager teenage son. After the inquest on Clayton records a verdict of murder by person or persons unknown, piece by piece, Meredith puts together a case against the guilty. The clues are slight, but prove significant – pleasingly, they even include an Adolf Hitler-style moustache.
Despite using the Lake District as a ‘hook’ to attract interest, Bude wisely avoids falling into the trap of turning the book into a travelogue. We see the Lake District where people live and work, rather than the tourist trap. Bude’s Lakeland is an often sombre place of quiet pubs and lonely filling stations, with towns and villages inhabited by affable bank managers, burly tanker drivers, and women who ‘shopped, cooked, cleaned, darned, mended, washed, and ironed, and all for a matter of ten shillings a week’.
Instead of more familiar spots such as Ambleside and Windermere, Bude’s storyline features relatively unglamorous coastal towns such as Whitehaven and Maryport, and is all the more credible because of it. This book may be a product of the Golden Age of detective fiction, but it is a world away from the unreality of bodies in the library and cunningly contrived killings in transcontinental trains. Meredith earns a well-deserved promotion at the end of the book, and he proceeded to appear in most of Bude’s murder stories, which numbered thirty in all by the time of his death in 1957.
Three years after
The Lake District Murder
was published, Muna Lee and Maurice Guinness – who, under the pen-name Newton Gayle, wrote a quintet of acclaimed detective novels in a short-lived burst of creative energy – produced
Sinister Crag
, a climbing mystery set among the Lakeland fells. But theirs is essentially the perspective of outsiders; Bude’s book conveys a broader and perhaps more authentic picture of life – and death – in this beautiful part of the world.
