How better to commemorate the birth of one J.C. than by exploring the work of another? And so to Truth Comes Limping (1938), the seventeenth mystery by Alfred Walter Stewart writing as J.J. Connington and the thirteenth to feature his detective Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield. And, once more with this author, I find myself swimming against the apparent direction of opinion: Nick Fuller rated this at 2/5, Martin Edwards calls it “very disappointing”, and Curtis Evans dismisses it as a “lackluster mystery plot with dull characters and turgid writing”. And so, of course, I really rather enjoyed it — sure, it’s at the weaker end of the four-star ratings I’ve given Connington elsewhere, but for sheer Humdrum delights it’s rather fine.

Our inciting incident here is two lovers stumbling upon a dead body on a public pathway at the edge of the estate owned by tartar Druce Carfax. In due course, The Police Are Baffled and Driffield is summoned into the affair, dragging after him the ever-curious ‘Squire’ Wendover who, despite repeated involvement in Driffield’s cases, is still unable to stop himself jumping to conclusions about the workings of the professional police: accusing Driffield of not following trails when that task has already been assigned to one of the myrmidons, or desperate to find some unexplored avenue in police thinking but unhappy when it seems to swing suspicion in the direction of “fellow landowner” Carfax. God, Wendover is such a prick.

Thankfully, Connington does solid if unspectacular work elsewhere, progressing ideas by very intelligent policing — really, Driffield honestly does feel like the intelligent policeman made (almost) flesh: none of the genius insights of, say, Dr. John Thorndyke, but instead simply applying sensible, intelligent reasoning to the situation to ferret out the key principles. If you can’t enjoy chapter IX, in which Wendover and Driffield discuss the various permutations of the case to date (“[M]ost murderers are fools. So you can’t argue that because a man makes an obvious slip, therefore he isn’t a murderer.”) then, my word, you poor soul.

What’s especially interesting here is the sense of societal progression in its many forms: one character “having never seen a photographer’s flashlight before” and so being “amazed by the clearness with which even the grass blades stood out individually in that fierce illumination”, the notion that even in rural areas with long memories “we don’t visit the sins of the fathers on the children the way we used to do”, or the decline in quality of domestic servants (“Not much of the old family retainer about these two, is there?”). Placed in an era when there is “over-much” in the way of “world-shaking” news, there’s a sense here of a society on the edge of unwelcome, irresistible change, and that provides a fascinating through-line in the background of other events.

And it is those other events that take the foreground, with steady, meticulous detection slowly paving the way for the truth that comes limping into view. “Well, you didn’t seem to do much yourself yesterday,” Wendover complains at one point, but Driffield’s investigation, for all its complexities — not helped by having some smartarse hanging on his coattails to slow things down — never pauses, dredging up ideas left and right, and introducing an interesting array of characters past and present. I enjoyed the (undeniably prolix) novelist Robert Denzil, keen to be involved if only to acquire verisimilitude for his own thrillers, and the Carfax clan (their history on the tip of Wendover’s tongue, so enmeshed is everyone in everyone else’s lives, another aspect of life that’s on the way out) represent quite an array of Types for us to get suspicious about.

Sure, the motive ends up fairly obvious and must be dropped in via diary, never anyone’s favourite means of discovery, and chapter VI adds nothing besides a voluble country type rendered in phonetic speech (though I quite liked him — “There was this pore bloke…gone to ‘is long ‘ome, as the Good Book says, an’ no more needin’ money that w’at a cock angel needs boot polish.”), but balance this against Driffield’s wonderful dryness…

“You remind me of the story about the Scotsman when a fly fell into his whiskey. He lifted it out and wrung it dry before he threw it away.”

…and the careful intelligence on display and, to my mind, there’s much more in the credit column. It probably helps when put in context — against the experimentation of The Castleford Conundrum (1932), Gold Brick Island (1933), and The Brandon Case (1934) this feels like Connington settling in the kind of thing he’s happiest writing, largely devoid as it is of the pedantry of those smaller, more conjectural books — but there’s still plenty here for the Humdrum fan who picks it up without that wider understanding. Goodwill to all who can find in this the joys that I did, and a happy festive season to you all.

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