Case for Three Detectives (1936) by Leo Bruce was perhaps the first impossible crime novel I read after becoming aware that the subgenre existed, and it had such a marked effect on me that, nearly 15 years later, it was the first title added to my Locked Room Library. Revisiting it is, then, something I approached with trepidation: I have experience of beloved texts failing to live up to my memories…but, then, I’ve reread books I enjoyed and found them even more delightful on more than one occasion. So forward I sallied into this: a weekend gathering, a locked room throat-slashing, and the usual rounds of suspicion and obscure proclamations from three genius amateur detectives.

Bruce wrote this with his tongue wedged firmly in his cheek, but it’s more of a parody of the eponymous detectives than an Anthony Berkeley-esque comment on the detective story per se. Knowing the solution to this ahead of time, I was able to appreciate the clever ways early on that Bruce sows so many of the seeds of misdirection which are the meat and drink of classic detection. Indeed, there’s an early example which is so hilariously brazen that you wonder how he ever got away with it, and it was magnificent to be able to appreciate this sharpness at second encounter.

However, the real achievement here is how accurately Bruce nails his takes on “those indefatigably brilliant private investigators who seem to be always handy when a murder has been committed”. Lord Simon Plimsoll has Peter Wimsey’s affected speech and ingratiating manner, M. Amer Picon has Hercule Poirot’s avuncular foreignness and love of order, and Monsignor Smith is G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown all the way down to his somewhat circular gnomic utterances (“Because it was a new Will you want to turn it into an Old Testament.”) and intuitive reasoning. While the book fails in certain regards, its strength of character parody is something to behold.

There is also some good commentary on the tropes that had become somewhat ingrained in detective fiction:

It was not extraordinary for there to be three total strangers questioning the servants, or for the police to be treated with smiling patronage, or for the corpse to be pulled about by anyone who was curious to know how it had become a corpse…I really wondered how these queer customs had arisen.

I especially enjoyed the reflection by our narrator Townsend that “[b]ereavement, on these occasions, as I have often noticed, is a bore; detection is what matters”, and so he finds himself “plunged into this role of enquiring and credulous fool, to whom the great investigators would voice their conundrums” and the usual pattern begins to paint itself. This does not mean, however, that the book is without more serious moments, where again Bruce acquits himself admirably:

It was not merely that the mystery was to be elucidated, but that a human being was to be sent to a certain death… Someone was to be named, arrested, tried and hanged — someone we knew, someone we had conversed with to-day. I looked down at my hand and saw that it was slightly trembling.

Along for the ride, and almost below consideration, is the local Sergeant Beef, who disdains the genius amateurs who “try to make it complicated” and claims to know the guilty party from the very early stages…but has been told to hold fire until the more celebrated amateurs have had their say. Beef would go on to feature in seven novels, so we know that he will turn out to be correct in the end, and it’s one of the book’s failures that his solution is achieved by means that are occluded from the reader. The whole point, after all, is that everyone sees the same things and comes to wildly varying conclusions, so Beef having extra knowledge that no-one possesses seems to spoil the joke somewhat.

The solutions are, however, great fun, with the compactness of Picon’s summary and the verbosity of Smith’s perfectly matching the styles of the authors whose noses are being tweaked. I remembered there being rather more distinction between the three methods, but it was fascinating to me as a relative neophyte in the Golden Age to see the different interpretations put on events, and I enjoyed, if slightly less so given again some of the things we’re not shown, seeing the patterns woven again. It didn’t hit as hard, but I have the best part of a decade and a half of soaking in the genre, so that’s hardly unexpected.

Wonderfully, however, I completely misremembered the guilty party, and so fell fully into a trap laid for the reader in the closing stages, so experienced the intended misinterpretation of some key evidence. Without that, I think I might err on the side of caution and maybe knock a star off the above rating, but it was lovely to be fooled a second time. Maybe I should set a time limit on my rereads, and not open a book for a second time until at least 12 years have elapsed since finishing it, so that finer details have been worn down in my memory by the ceaseless tide of my scrambling to fit in as many books as my lifespan will allow.

I enjoyed returning to Sergeant Beef’s first case, and I remember there being much to admire in Case with No Conclusion (1939) and Case for Sergeant Beef (1947). It also served to remind me that I’ve not read some of the later titles in this series, and so I shall attempt to track those down in the years ahead to get a sense of the full career of William Beef. At its best, Bruce’s keen eye for the absurdities of the genius detective does much to remind me of why I love this genre in the first place, and that’s an experience I’m keen to replicate as often as possible.

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The Sergeant Beef novels by Leo Bruce:

1. Case for Three Detectives (1936)
2. Case without a Corpse (1937)
3. Case with No Conclusion (1939)
4. Case with Four Clowns (1939)
5. Case with Ropes and Rings (1940)
6. Case for Sergeant Beef (1947)
7. Neck and Neck (1951)
8. Cold Blood (1952)