In the latter stages of World War 2, artist Bruce Manaton is painting the portrait of a friend dressed in the robes of a cardinal, and his sister Rosanne fretting about the efficacy of the blackout curtains on the studio where they live, when there is a knock at the door. It seems that a special constable has discovered the body of murdered Old Mr. Folliner, the Manatons’ miserly landlord, and apprehended the killer as he was fleeing. Leaving the suspect in the care of the five people in the studio — two chess-playing friends have also dropped by for the evening — the constable summons the police, and before long Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald finds himself with another complex tangle to unfurl.

Checkmate to Murder (1944) is another good example of the characteristics which mark out the works of E.C.R. Lorac, chiefly seeming to involve a tight circle drawn around a limited number of suspects in a crime and a strong sense of place and time which feeds the narrative. There is a real sense here of the sheer exhaustion of living through the war, with the shots which ended Old Folliner’s life going unacknowledged because, well, bangs in the night have become somewhat commonplace.

“[W]hen you come to think of it, Londoners have heard so many bangs during their recent history, that a pistol shot isn’t so impressive a row as it used to be…I daresay, subconsciously, one assesses sounds in the light of one’s experiences. You know the inward reaction to a bang — ‘That’s nothing. There was no vibration with it.’ It’s the vibration — the shudder of earth and fabric which means something to the initiated.”

Later on, one character is dismissive of a man who had to leave London on account of not being able to put up with the air raids, even if the event which scared him off was “[n]ot what I call a real raid, not enough to make me get up and put the kettle on, just sirens and a bit of gunfire, but it frightened him silly, all the same”. One gets a sense not so much of fear as boredom, and Lorac — who writes well about the war elsewhere, too — seems to know whereof she speaks.

The little historical touches really enrich this: the disdain at people being urged to dig shelters in their gardens (“If they’d been in Flanders they’d have known better. Undrained trenches, indeed.”), the difficulty of getting a watch repaired so that it keeps trustworthy time, the talk of house prices becoming ungovernable so that the future of dwellings in the capital is seen to lie in selling land for blocks of flats…Lorac would alternate her novel settings between London and the northern counties, and it seems the change of focus each time really allows her to glom onto telling aspects of setting like this each time, bringing her milieu to life.

Which is just as well, because I found the mystery here a little disappointing. Credit where it’s due, she does an almost Christianna Brand-quality job of finding alternative explanations for the very narrow situation she has posed, and manages to spell out before the halfway point the scheme which I was fairly certain was going to be the terminal answer. Yet her detection is oddly muted; so much of it takes place off-page, with Macdonald telling other characters what intelligent steps have been taken and what inspired possibilities have been followed up…so we’re left with only a handful of characters who could be involved all saying the same things over and over, and after a while it becomes a trifle dull and then horrendously obvious what must have happened.

Better spooling out of those possiblities, mixed with a little more active detection, would make this a stronger novel, almost in the Christie class, but Lorac’s decision to rush some elements and expand others doesn’t really pay off. When one thread begins to develop in the second half — and very entertaining it is, too, following young Reeves on his investigations — you know full well that it’s going to come to aught because…well, you’ve read a detective novel before. And the sheer amount of time dedicated to it when, as I say, more telling developments are skated over in a single sentence, is somewhat frustrating. It’s decisions like this which speak so loudly when it comes to Lorac’s relatively neglected status before the British Library took to reprinting her; you appreciate how much more adroitly Brand, Christie and others would have written this exact same mix, and how much of a minor classic it might have been as a result.

It is, though, very well written, even if you do have to wade through more hip-deep ‘Cockney’ dialogue than anyone should ever have to endure…

“I got you a coupla’ pairs of lovely ’errings orf the barrow as I passed. You can’t beat ’errings for food value, and tasty at that.”

Her character work is good, with the likes of the pompous Mr. Verraby, the special constable who sets the whole chain in motion, rubbing Macdonald up the wrong way, and some refreshing reflections on the meritoriousness of inquests (“You always get at least one idiot on a jury…”). And Macdonald, too, sometimes a bit of a cipher, comes through clearly on the matter of why investigating murder in wartime matters; I still don’t get any real sense of him as a character even after nine novels, but it’s nice to see Lorac not neglect the moral side of all these mental gymnastics. And so, even if this reader got a little impatient in the latter stages, Checkmate to Murder is difficult not to enjoy, highlighting much of what has made Lorac successful with modern audiences. But the genre, and the Golden Age as an example of the peak of such undertakings, would have been poorly served if these were the greatest heights it ever attained.

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E.C.R. Lorac on The Invisible Event: