Leo Bruce’s eighth and final novel in which Sergeant William Beef sallies forth into polite company to batter them with blunt questions hiding a brilliant mind, Cold Blood (1952) is a strong effort that marks a distinct improvement from preceding title, the over-long and frankly tedious Neck and Neck (1951). It’s the battering to death of a wealthy landowner which concerns us here, with Beef brought in by Cosmo Ducrow’s surviving family to counter the evidence piling up against the dead man’s nephew, Rudolf. But, the more Beef looks, the blacker the case against Rudolf becomes…so is this the final convention-busting solution Bruce has for us at the cap of this series, or is something more subtle going on?

Interestingly — given that our author and sleuth both got their start in the heart of the Golden Age, and, with tongues wedged firmly in cheeks, picked apart more than a few conventions on the way through the six ensuing cases — there’s a sense of despondency at times, almost as if Beef knows that the very culture that has sustained him is itself on the way out:

“This detection can be a dirty business. Poking about in other people’s affairs and getting them to commit themselves.”

“You mean that you’re sorry for the murderer?”

“I don’t say that. But I do get sick of it all sometimes. Digging out little secrets. Causing unhappiness, very likely, to people who have done no harm.”

“Aren’t you being rather morbid? After all, you’re seeing that an innocent man isn’t punished, aren’t you?”

“There aren’t any innocent men,” said Beef gloomily.

We get the expected tropes of the Beef novels — suspicious Types who all might have something to hide, rounds of interviews in which the earthy Sergeant gets more out of people than the official police did, rounds of darts at “the local” where connections are formed which will prove useful in the breaking of the case, and, of course, Lionel Townsend being a pompous arse in the best possible way:

[Over dinner I] drew what I thought were some rather clever comparisons between writers whose names, I consider, confer a certain kudos on those who can discuss their work intelligently — such modern giants as Christopher Isherwood and Christopher Fry, Edith Sitwell and Elizabeth Bowen, W.H. Auden and V.S. Pritchett, Stephen Spender and Louis Macneice, a galaxy of illustrious names which I thought would arouse their interest. It was not long, however, before I saw that I was wasting my energy, for Gray confessed to a taste for such old-fashioned and bourgeois novelists as Conrad and Galsworthy, while Gulley could talk of nothing but “Westerns”. As soon as I could politely do so I took my leave and went up to bed.

In a way, it works slightly against this book that these trapping are all so familiar, because it means that it doesn’t really stand out from its stablemates, meeting the requirements without excelling. Add to this the fact that everyone is about one quarter-turn of the head away from realising they’re in a detective novel — Inspector Stute noting sarcastically that Beef is due to “startle us presently” with the solution, the denouement of gathering the suspects being dismissed as “the last word in corn” — and it really adds to the sense of the author feeling a little tired of the lampoonery expected of him, but rolling it out because it gets bums on seats (or books off shelves, I suppose).

It’s all very enjoyable, however, despite failing to summon up much that is new, but I do hold against the book that we’re effectively given a Challenge to the Reader on page 152 (of 217) telling us that all is known to Beef, and so the reader, but it’s not until 40 pages later that the solution is elucidated. Amusing, too, to reflect that, given all the books published in the Golden Age and all the possible combinations in which one may read them these days, two consecutive Thursday reviews on this blog have ended with (rot13 for minor spoilers) n qrgrpgvir funzzvat qehaxraarff gb fche gur pevzvany vagb na npgvba gung tvirf gurz njnl.

It feels like this was constructed with slightly less panache than Beef’s previous cases — I intuited out the killer of Cosmo ahead of time, and was disappointed to discover that Beef did the same thing, rather than having strong evidence I’d overlooked — but, equally, it does what you’d expect a Sergeant Beef book to do, and as such remains a very pleasant time. I’d like to take away a little more than a reference to Inspector French and the dismissal of the question “What do you think?” as a “distasteful Americanism”, but seeing the good Sergeant end his days well is pleasing, and I won’t begrudge Bruce the success he has here.

Crikey, is this the most negative positive review I’ve written? I liked it, I tell you, but it does feel like the concept had run its course. Now I just need to decide whether Bruce’s Carolus Deene books that followed this series warrant investigating. Thoughts?

~

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)