The recent Bodies from the Library conference will have brought Clifford Witting to everyone’s mind, so the time seems ripe to look at Let X be the Murderer (1947), the latest Witting title to be reprinted by Galileo Publishers. When Sir Victor Warringham phones the police with a story of luminous, ghostly hands trying to strangle him in the night, Detective Inspector Charlton must contend with the various facets of Warringham’s household trying to prevent him from investigating. When murder is committed in the house, however, the denizens cannot block the investigation, despite a few keeping secrets that they’d rather not have brought to light.

This is the third novel I’ve read by Witting, and patterns are beginning to emerge even after so small a sample. He has a great eye for small casts pushed together by force of circumstance, and, like E.C.R. Lorac, does a very good job capturing the difficult relationships that would develop in such conditions. The provisions of the old man’s will have seen sides drawn, with housekeeper Mrs. Winters in stark opposition to Sir Victor’s son-in-law Clement Harler and his coquettish second wife Gladys, but these foreground fireworks shouldn’t distract from the wonderful minor characters — look at the contrasting ways the cook Mrs. Gulliver and maid Lily refer to the Harlers — or the deceptive simplicity of the plot Willing has on the boil.

In a weird sort of way, this is almost an inverted mystery, since the crime is so very cut and dried that the reader will have a good sense of where things are going early on. And from this comes one of only two faults I can level at this book: Witting really needed to cut this by about forty pages so that interest could remain high throughout, rather than, say — as in chapter fourteen — having Charlton lay out events for his superior officer in a manner that is ponderous for the reader, who already knows everything that is said. True, the relationships between the officers are enjoyable, and the men themselves appealingly human (c.f. Charlton yearning to “hit [Harler] with something that would hurt” upon their first meeting), but given how familiar the first half of this narrative is, some sleekness would have been appreciated.

I do, however, very much enjoy Witting’s prose:

“Troubles always come in threes, ‘aven’t you noticed, sir? First I broke the cup, then we found [the victim] murdered. I wonder what the third’ll be. I do ‘ope it’s nothink serious, like one of the best tea-service.”

Just as your attention might start to wander, he catches you with some playful wit — reflecting on the role of the amateur detective, or lamenting the difficulties raised by frosted glass panels in pubs — or casually throws a mention of cannibalism, lycanthropy, or frogs boiled in goat’s milk to intrigue. Glimmers of a more serious side show through, too, with reference to the rise in spiritualism in the wake of the First World War, but Witting is at his best when playing with a not quite straight bat so as to better reflect on the oddities of human nature that render individuals so appealing to each other.

Nowhere is this better captured than in the personage of ten year-old John Campbell, who — but for a Blytonesque tendency to consider everything “trific” — almost joins the ranks of perfectly-realised children of classic crime fiction (c.f. Home Sweet Homicide (1944), The Voice of the Corpse (1948)). Young John is especially affecting in his dealings with gardener Tom Blackmore (I particularly enjoyed Blackmore chastening the boy “with a severity hard to maintain”), who seems to be the only adult who values John for more than just the selfishness of his youthful presence bringing some joy to the decrepit old house populated by acidulated harridans at each others’ throats.

The second half of the book sees the complexity, if not the pace, ramp up, and gives rise to the second flaw: the developments in the closing stages are so tightly-packed (one of those patterns of Witting’s writing I’m beginning to spot…) that it feels like our author is trying to gloss over the fact that there’s simply no indication of how Charlton realises the truth. He would, by events herein, suspect certain things from an early stage…but why? Almost more annoyingly, the one piece of evidence held back from the reader ends up feeding a false trail…so why not tell us it when Charlton discovers it? The situation develops in such convoluted ways that I’m not sure even the canniest reader will be able to anticipate it with any basis of certainty, and it would be lovely to believe that Charlton was doing more than simply solving the problem because his creator knows the answer.

As an examination of how intelligent misdirection has allowed the novel of detection to delight for more than a century, Let X be the Murderer is a sterling example of what a clever author can do with even the most unpromising of setups — much like Lorac (her again) in Checkmate to Murder (1944). Little wrinkles here are wonderful — the complexity of the situation that necessitates the murder, or how and why the ghostly attack which starts the whole thing off completely fails to anticipate the character of Sir Victor — and if Witting could have forestalled his urge to be so damn verbose he’d probably be a lot better known; on this evidence, he deserves to be.

My thanks, then, to Robert Hyde of Galileo for his efforts in bringing Witting back into print, and for providing me with a copy of this book for review. Any author who plots this well and doesn’t baulk at giving his characters Croftian names like Sir Ninian Oxenham certainly warrants further investigation…