#1386: Case with No Conclusion (1939) by Leo Bruce

Another man accused of murder, another family member going to an amateur detective to prove his innocence. The classics don’t wear, do they? This time it is Stewart Ferrers accused of murdering local GP Dr. Benson late at night in his own home, and Stewart’s brother Peter who goes to ex-Sergeant Wm. Beef, now set up as a private enquiry agent, in the hope that evidence can be uncovered to cast doubt on the conviction. And along for the ride is Beef’s faithful-if-frustrated chronicler Townsend (now called Lionel despite calling himself Stuart at the end of the previous novel…) who hopes that something interesting might come of this to put him on equal footing with other novelists who relate the cases of their famous detectives.

Leo Brice is quick to get on with the fun in his third novel, Case with No Conclusion (1939), with Beef and Townsend debating reviews of the previous books (“You saw what Mr. Milward Kennedy said. ‘Tedious’ he called it…”) and the fact that other authors — Margery Allingham, Nicholas Blake, John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie, Freeman Wills Crofts, Philip MacDonald — seem to get nicer reviews and have a more respectful relationship with the sleuths they follow around. This spills over into the first conversation with Peter Ferrers…

I groaned. “There is always a violent quarrel,” I said. “How can I expect to make a good story of Beef’s cases, when they conform so closely to type?”

“I’m bound to admit,” said Ferrers rather curtly, “that I’m less concerned with your efforts at fiction than I am with the clearing of my brother’s name.”

…and, of course, sets the game up beautifully: the one thing we can be sure is going to happen here is that Bruce will not be conforming to type.

Of course, what starts to unfold is a most superbly typical Golden Age novel of detection with plenty of sinister happenings and obscure clues. Who was the mysterious man seen creeping out of the bushes? How can a knife have been wiped clean yet still be covered in blood? Since Stewart Ferrers insists he let Dr. Benson out of his house, how could the medical man have regained the lounge, where he was found slain? The small events pile up, “and Beef…fumble[s] clumsily with a great deal of evidence…chas[ing] a number of red herrings” while Scotland Yard man Stute, reappearing from Case without a Corpse (1937) enjoys much more success and conviction in his own investigations. Townsend, it must be said, is distraught:

I had accepted the fact that a crime-writer’s detective could actually fail to discover the guilty person in a case, or, as in the present one, be incapable of saving an innocent man’s life. But was it really possible? It was a thing that had never been allowed to happen before, and with that huge and influential precedent behind it, could it happen now?

Townsend, methinks, is remiss in not reading his Anthony Berkeley…

While grappling with these clichés — “We need a woman in this case…”, “Must [interview] a parson. Wouldn’t be a case without a parson.” — Bruce does some stalwart work in displaying a less-than-complimentary view of judges, which feels rather daring for the time…

He belonged to a class of judges which the newspapers have greatly popularized, and one with which I found myself in little sympathy. By posing as unworldly, living in a rarefied atmosphere untouched by the normal trivialities of life, they were able to bring out questions of unbelievably simple ingenuousness to the immense and satisfying laughter from the body of the Court. … I may be conservative in feeling that it is bad taste to joke a man’s life away, but I felt that Stewart was in no condition to be made part of a music-hall turn.

…and the odd bit of historical placement (“Hitler’s off again about something. And they’ve bumped another dozen of them off in Russia.”) only serves to now enhance the nose-thumbing at convention that is so nearly perfected herein. And the ending does not disappoint, with, admittedly, rather more surmise than I’m strictly comfortable with, but a superb smothering of the book’s comedic tendencies to bring about the conclusion of this case which, we’re told up front, isn’t going to have one.

Like everyone else who reads crime novels as well as studying crime, [he] had frequently been irritated by the ease and assurance with which private investigators strolled through the maze of evidence, calmly taking the one preordained path towards veracity. He had felt, as he had observed the masters in action, from Holmes and Blake to Thorndike and Mason, peeved by their certainty of success.

Add to this some excellent writing that shows he can play with a straight bat if he wants to, dammit — c.f. the reflection on the power of the jury at the end of chapter XXVII — and you’ve got a simply delightful book that’s an extra joy if you’re a bit deeper in the Golden Age than the typical reader. This is for me the pinnacle of Beef and Townsend’s interactions, but the series would still find more to do that challenged the conventions we so love, and we can be grateful for all Bruce did to bring them more to our attention. It is to be hoped that the reviews at the time appreciated this…

The Sergeant Beef novels by Leo Bruce: