As my grandfather used to say, “When you fall off the horse, get back on the horse”. And that’s why he lost his job and the Health and Safety Officer at that horse riding school. But the fact remains that lately I’ve had some disheartening reading experiences with favoured authors — John Dickson Carr, J.J. Connington, Freeman Wills Crofts, A.A. Fair, Craig Rice, Cornell Woolrich — and so the tempting thing is to leave them alone for a while, wait for that memory to fade, and then return. But, no, I’m not doing that, I’m reading Connington again now, because why not? That’s what the horse is here. It was a metaphorical horse all along.

Alas, by clambering back onto my horse with The Brandon Case, a.k.a. The Ha-Ha Case (1934), I’ve basically put my foot in the stirrup, boosted myself up, and flown right over the horse to land on my face again. Because while the contents here would make a genuinely exceptional short story, the absence of real events, bluntness of the clues, absence of intrigue, and tedious discussions that end up resolving everything in such minutely technical ways really do not mix well when s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d o-u-t over the word count of a novel. It’s enough to put a man off metaphorical horses for life.

His father having squandered the entailed family wealth, young Johnnie Brandon was sent to grow up with family friend Thomas Laxford and his wife, under the arrangement that Laxford would receive money for his services which Brandon, Sr. has failed to pay. But with Johnnie about to achieve his majority, elder Brandon brother Jim travels down to visit Johnnie in the hope of persuading him to put into action a chain of events that will reverse the family’s financial position. Johnnie, though, has a rather more left-wing perspective, perhaps due to the influence of Laxford and his attractive young wife:

There was no art or persuasiveness in the curt, jerky sentences, but their very breathlessness betrayed the intensity of the enthusiasm behind them. It was the crude socialism of adolescence, a froth of generous feeling untempered by the slightest experience of the world; and the other descendant of ten generations of squires listened to it with an increasingly evident contempt.

On the morning of Johnnie’s birthday, Johnnie, Jim, Laxford, and a house guest called Hay go out to shoot rabbits, and one of the party is shot, seemingly accidentally. Close to 70 pages later, Inspector Hinton has reason to suspect it’s murder and, with about 30 pages remaining, Chief Constable Clinton Driffield is brought into proceedings to explain the screamingly obvious clues which have been slowly gathered and thus expose our killer and their motive. And that’s it. Well, there’s a bit where a gardener seems to muddy the ground by swapping around some cartridges in the guns, but that peters out to very little.

In fairness to Connington — based on this and his previous detective novel The Castleford Conundrum (1932) — he seems to be going through a patch where he’s pushing at his limited resources to explore what the detective story can do. As in Castleford, the essential plot here is very simple, but he packs it out with good character touches (Hinton’s tobacco, say, or the scientific gathering of information by the nosey Mrs. Tugby) that are utterly charming but in no way make up for an absence of incident. He captures mood well — that restless awkwardness of everyone the night before the shooting, and Una Mentieth’s frustration with Jim’s literal mind, is brilliantly limned — but, lor’, he takes his time doing it.

The plot here feels like an almost Anthony Berkeleyan exercise is how little plot you need to spin a novel-worth of intrigue out of a death, but everything is so coarse; you don’t necessarily know what the clues betoken, but it’s so blindly obvious what is a clue that you feel Berkeley would have a field day with this concept. And it takes so long from Hinton to decide that it’s murder — no doubt realistic, but I question the wisdom of a single death being pulled out to such voluble lengths. Yes, it’s based on a real life case, but the prerogative of fiction is to add stuff to make it interesting. This seems to be a phase of Connington’s at present, though, since he forsook it to write the excellent Jack-in-the-Box (1944), let’s hope it doesn’t last much longer.

Incidentally, every other review I can find of this book praises it for its construction and intelligence, so make of my opinion what you will. This is my seventeenth Connington novel, and the last couple have, despite some innovations, been so tedious that I’d never read him again if that was all I had to go on. I’ll saddle up this horse again, of course I will, but for now I’m going to lick my wounds, curse all horses in general, and try to find a more accommodating steed for my next…ride?

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