When young Frank Conway returns to his hotel on the edge of the South Downs one evening in a distracted frame of mind, none of the other denizens of the Fernbank think much of it. His request for an audience with various people are rejected in the rush for dinner and when, over that same meal, Conway dies in an agonising and protracted manner, many of the people present begin to regret their thoughtlessness. Conway’s final movements then fall under the remit of local man Inspector Baines, and, with the dead man’s sister also in attendance, two parallel investigations are run…but which will bear fruit first? And how does the sighting of a ghastly half man, half monster on the Downs tie into events?

There’s a lot to enjoy in The Secret of the Downs (1939) which, if you’re wondering, sits at the very top of the second tier of Walter S. Masterman’s output. The only thing really telling against it is its length, padded out by lots of people having lots of meetings and indulging in lots of conversations when, honestly, you just wish someone would get to the mysterious stone altar at the core of things and just bloody get on with it. The at-times-ominous mood of the mysterious Downs is well-limned…

The lights through the red curtains of the low mullioned windows gave the place a squat evil look, like an impish old man caught out in some crime.

…and the characters are uncommonly well-drawn, from the various gossipy types staying at the Fernbank all the way through to the mysteriously threatening landlord of the Two Fishermen pub, to the mayor of Duckworth, who had “employed a needy but learned gentleman to buy [for him] the sort of books one would expect to find in a gentleman’s library”. Masterman does a good job with the propinquity of everyone in this rural setting, too, with no event being too small to pass notice and have plenty of opinion offered upon it.

In truth, the motive for what is happening gets ferreted out relatively early, and so this is more an exercise in trying to figure out who the person behind the various attacks is — something, in fairness to Masterman, I only twigged to because of my familiarity with a certain classic of the genre. For the most part, a good job is done keeping the reader in the dark, with the elderly, perhaps not-entirely-sane Mr. Summerbund coming under much suspicion, especially when he ups and vanishes at a key moment and ex-Scotland Yard man Sir Arthur Sinclair is forced to do much reasoning in the old boy’s absence.

I found my attention wandering in the final straight, I can’t deny, but there are some wonderful sentences to catch you unawares (“The mayor suddenly assumed an angry manner, as cowards do when they are scared.”) and the occasional good aside to keep the author in your good graces (c.f. the use of “tri-nitro-benzo-acetamide, which sounded formidable enough to kill anyone.”). If I’d had more time to commit to this rather than having to work through it piecemeal, I may well have bowled through without noticing how long things seem to take to come together, but, lor’, don’t the characters ever love meeting up in one location or another to tell each other things that the reader has already seen. I know you need to carry the inattentive with you, but, cripes, anyone who needs that much reminding would have forgotten where they last put the book down and so would never get round to finishing it.

Some of what’s here is baffling simply because Masterman loves to make things complicated (if you can follow the Clock Golf clue, you’re a better person than I…) and some baffles simply because age had moved attitudes on (a question implied at one point basically asks ‘How can anyone stay fit if they don’t play golf?’). I also sniggered like a schoolboy at the prospect of Sinclair being invited to a “sausage party” and I refuse to apologise for that — Masterman brings out the goon in me, it seems, and I cannot be expected to uphold the normal standards of behaviour or expectation while in his clutches.

Does it make sense, in the final analysis? Lord knows. There’s an impossible vanishing which is pretty easy to figure out but undeniably well-handled, and I consider the death of Conway to be an impossible crime since there seems to be no way that the key thing could have been introduced in time to cause his death. But, I’ll be honest, I read this over a week before writing this review — an unusually long gap for me — and I’ve plum forgotten how this was achieved. So clearly not a method for the ages, but I didn’t mind how it wrapped up, and the romance at its core is surprisingly well-handled given how Masterman often plots like a Victorian man who has only just discovered that ladies have ankles. If 35 pages could be taken out of this I’d be urging it upon people for several years hence, but for now, well, the reader is warned.

So make of that what you will. I’m off of a lie down after all this excitement.

Standalone: