I should have loved Neck and Neck (1951), chronologically the seventh of eight Sergeant Beef novel by Leo Bruce: after all, Kate at Cross-Examining Crime placed it as the sixth-best overall, and we’re nothing if not contrary in our opinions: she has the excellent Case for Sergeant Beef (1947) in seventh place, worse than this — a sure sign this is in fact a superb and under-appreciated gem. Alas, apart from the occasionally adept turn of phrase and a few ideas, this is pretty torpid stuff, in no way justifying the four-year gap between titles in this series…unless it took Bruce that long to write because he kept getting so bored with it himself.

Regular narrator Lionel Townsend’s Aunt Aurora is poisoned and, aware that he was due to inherit and thus will come under suspicion, he writes to ex-Sergeant Beef — “I was deeply troubled, even a little scared, and I wanted the comfort of his gross but comforting personality.” — asking him to come and solve the murder. And Beef is only too happy to oblige…except that he already has an interesting murder on the boil in the Cotswolds, the death by strangulation of unpleasant publisher Edwin Ridley, so he’ll have to take on both cases at once, let them run neck-and-neck, and see if he can’t solve them both at once. Might make enough material for another of Townsend’s books, that.

The first problem for me what that this story is simultaneously in a rush to get wherever it’s going, and yet so languidly-paced as to, at times, utterly defy this reader’s patience. The scene transitions in the opening half are bizarre in how we’ll suddenly, from one paragraph to the next, completely alter our location: Beef and Townsend having a conversation in a car, say, only to then be sitting in a pub opposite someone, as if Bruce doesn’t have the patience to detail the transition from one place to the next. It makes for a jumpy, alienating experience, and was getting on my nerves long before I concluded that the book was a dud.

We can, though, perhaps be thankful that Bruce didn’t take his time, because what remains is so very, very samey and dull that dragging my way through it was a chore of the sort that would ordinarily see me quit on a book altogether. Only my determination to get all eight books in this series onto my blog saw me persevere…and, even then, I must confess to skipping a few pages as the interview of suspect A gave way to the interview of suspect B and the interview of suspect C and the interview of suspect D, only to have the interview of suspect E follow hard upon, closely followed by the interview of suspects F and the G. Then they go and interview suspect H. Heaven and earth, must I remember?!

Some of it’s good: Bruce writes with genuine feeling about Lionel’s connection with this never-before-mentioned aunt, and the idea that he’s not being completely honest as a narrator is subtly folded in. Equally, it’s quite pleasing to see Beef on good terms with the professional police, the two men swapping reminiscences and sharing war stories on a drive out to visit another of the benighted suspects for yet more interviews. I do also rather enjoy Townsend’s petty uptightness, it feeling decidedly more self-aware than the similar vein mined by that unutterably pompous ass ‘Squire’ Wendover in the Sir Clinton Driffield novels of J.J. Connington.

One can understand, too, the desire to spice up the murder of Townsend’s aunt — “[D]ear old lady though she may have been.” — with that of the decidedly more unscrupulous and objectionable Ridley, but it does mean that, at the halfway point of this not-short book, a boatload of new characters get shovelled at you…and, wow, are there ever a lot of people, still being introduced, it feels, even up to the point where the good ex-Sergeant gathers everyone and explains — shock! — that the two murder are linked after all. Some stand out, like Ridley’s secretary Lovelace, but a lot of them just blur in front of the eyes, and when Townsend said that he remembered suspect M making a reference to suspect Q I had to go back and read that interview because I didn’t remember the reference…and it turned out I reread the wrong interview anyway.

A few minor historical touches — apparently would address a telegram to a phone number rather than a physical address, which I guess makes sense now it’s been drawn to my attention — and a little era-appropriate speculation on areas of the world “behind the Iron Curtain or in a zone where war was only just round the corner” aside, there’s little of merit left to comment on. Bruce deserves credit for continuing the life of the detective story into a decade that was to tire of it rapidly, but this is also the slow death of formal detection manifest. As with all books, I’d rather read it and know what I think about it than spend decades wondering if it’s magnificent, but I won’t be revisiting this at any point in the future. So, Kate and I find ourselves in rare agreement here; let’s hope lightning strikes twice and her placement of final Beef novel Cold Blood (1952) at the peak of the series is borne out in my reading. Watch this space.

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See also

Nick @ The Grandest Game in the World: [W]e expect (and get) a good-natured parody of the detective story, lively detection by the coarse but very likeable ex-policeman (common, but out of the common) and plenty of amusing characters… [B]ut it will not take a hyper-intelligent reader to guess that the two murders are connected, and how.

Martin Edwards: It may be that there are no original whodunit plots, but certainly the central idea here is handled in a way that struck me as fresh and pleasing. Even though I knew roughly what was going on, I found the story readable and enjoyable. A good mystery that certainly deserves to be better known.

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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)