The Castleford Conundrum (1932) represented a change of pace for the detective fiction that Alfred Walter Stewart had been writing under the name J.J. Connington, being decidedly longer on character than his earlier works.  Gold Brick Island, a.k.a. Tom Tiddler’s Island (1933) from the following year shows that Stewart was clearly in for some experimentation in this era, seeing as it’s a separation from detective fiction altogether, rendering itself rather more like an adventure for a grown up Famous Five. Some mysterious types and a honeymooning couple converge on a tiny Scottish island, and the result is…somewhat mixed.

Newlyweds Colin and Jean Trent head to the small island of Ruffa — “[a]bout a mile long…and half a mile broad” — which is owned by their friend Mr. Craigmore, who has made his house Wester Voe available to them for three weeks. Only two other residences can be found on the island: a shieling inhabited by a Mr. Northfleet who is keen on bird-watching, and Heather Lodge, where Dr. Arrow, his niece, and some other gentlemen are staying. When Mr. Northfleet turns out to be a friend of Colin’s from university, and to know nothing about the birds he claims are his passion, and when a trip to Heather Lodge reveals an armed guard who harries them away with nary a word of explanation, clearly something is afoot. Add to this a mysterious wounded stranger who appears and the disappears one night, leaving a gold ingot behind him, and it seems the Trents have come to Ruffa at exactly the wrong time.

In fairness to Gold Brick Island, those ingredients are almost beat-for-beat what I found in most of the Alistair Maclean thrillers I’ve read, written at least a quarter of a century later, and so in a way Connington is ahead of his time here…which might explain why he makes such a dull stew of things. Some bits are pleasingly old-school and adventure-y, like Colin and Northfleet exploring by candlelight the secret passages beneath Wester Voe, accessed via a hidden door, bringing an almost Boys’ Own sort of playfulness to proceedings. And, given that this is the author’s thirteenth published novel, it should be no surprise that he manages some atmospheric writing and sharp scene-setting.

A whole series of previously isolated thoughts suddenly fitted themselves together into a pattern; and in Colin’s mental theatre a sinister drama began to unfold itself.

Working against this is that it takes an age before the apparently galactically credulous Jean begins to suspect anything, and so we spend a long time with obviously sinister and suspicious behaviour — mysterious yachts, strange noises, more gun-toting toughs than you can wave a phonetically-rendered Scottish accent at — just being blandly tolerated, and Colin quite happy that he and his new wife are clearly in danger. He’s deliberately not the most sharp-witted of individuals (I love Connington’s late characterising of him as “not the man to shrink from voicing an inference merely because it was self-evident.”), but, gleeps, even Blyton’s quintet would have realised something was up and turned tail long before The Wimmin get kidnapped and The Men must save the day via a series of violent escapades that, again, feel somewhat ahead of their time.

There’s some intelligence on display here, like a mid-book chapter on deciphering a code which contains some good ideas despite getting a little convoluted (inspired perhaps by Dorothy L. Sayers’ attempts at the same in Have His Carcase (1932)). And while the prevalence of brawn feels like Connington offering up some late excitement to make up for the long, slow start, a few brainy notions are to be applauded for tying things up rather than just having everything descend, Straw Dogs (1971)-like into pure violence. There’s also a deeply, hilariously inappropriate quip in here that feels like it sowed the seed for every Roger Moor James Bond film, and further informs the feeling of this very much being the first rung on the ladder of 1970s thrillers that would pour out of the paperback market four decades later.

Historically, too, there’s some interest, such as Jean mentioning early on a bracelet she had been leant that has “a swastika on it for luck”. And is it a misprint in my Coachwhip edition, or was the saying originally “people who [take] an ell when you [give] them an inch”? I’m not claiming these curiosities are enough to support you through a book whose execution suffers in comparison to the ideas its author clearly had for it, but equally it would be remiss to say there’s nothing here to catch the eye.

If this is the only Connington you’ve read, then gods help you, but also know that it represents a stylistic and tonal leap from the work he produced both prior to this, and, from the small amount of his subsequent work I’ve sampled, I don’t think it was an experiment he repeated. It is to be applauded that he divined the way the mystery thriller might overlap with a more intelligent novel of science and rational thought, but, even as someone who has come to appreciate more and more about his writing in recent years, I struggle to recommend this beyond its historical curiosity value and the few points discussed above. Approached from the perspective of proto-Maclean it probably stands up better, but fans of Connington’s earlier and later work are going to as baffled when they stumble upon this as I imagined readers were at the time of original publication.

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Kate @ Cross-Examining Crime: Atypical to an adventure thriller it is scientific know-how rather than brute force which wins the day. It is just a pity that he is dull as ditch water. Oh, and don’t get me started on the umpteen pages we are subjected to when Cyril takes Colin step by step through the cryptograms he solved.

Nick @ The Grandest Game in the World: Tom Tiddler is not exciting, by any means; it’s the work of Stewart the chemist, rather than Connington the mystery-monger. The middle section consists of the chemist Northcott lecturing Colin on cryptograms, then on the gold standard. The cryptogram part is impenetrable; mathematicians and other masochists might enjoy it, but I skimmed the bloody thing.

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