The notion that authors do their weakest work at the end of their career is under much scrutiny at present. Having recently devoured the final two novels by Norman Berrow, I picked up J.J. Connington’s antepenultimate novel The Twenty-One Clues (1941) with some slight hesitation — he’s all over the map quality-wise for me, having penned some of the most tendentiously dull novels in the genre — only for it to be easily among the best three of his I’ve read. Taking on the sort of tight focus that normally means he’s going to be tediously belabourous (c.f. The Brandon Case (1934)), this proved instead a delight of Humdrummery, intelligent detection, and superbly surprising plot mechanics.
