I have to be honest: I don’t think I gave The Penrose Mystery (1936) by R. Austin Freeman quite a fair go. I’ve been struggling to find much enthusiasm for reading of late, and I think even the most sprightly and event-packed of novels would have felt like so much boggy ground. So Freeman’s slightly pedantic tone and recapitulatory telling was absolutely not going to work for me, and I should have realised this and not bothered. But the blog needs three posts a week, and so I persisted and had a lousy time; alas, I want to write about Freeman (broadly) chronologically, so I either wait five years to read this again, or I write it up now and admit the slight unfairness of my perspective.

The first three chapters are told by Ernest Lockhart, barrister-at-law, and cover his association with one Daniel Penrose. The two meet by chance in an antique shop and strike up a sort-of-not-quite friendship, which results in Penrose disclosing to Lockhart something which I absolutely did not believe he would and so which must, I reasoned, be the reason for this section and Penrose’s subsequent disappearance. And — sort of spoilers — it is, and I really dislike that Freeman is so cavalier in his plotting here. I wouldn’t have believed the development had this section not been included, and since its inclusion didn’t make the development seem any more likely to me, well, it seems like a wasted opportunity.

We then switch to the perspective of Christopher Jervis, the most frequent of Freeman’s narrators, who, though his close association with Dr. John Thorndyke, is pulled into the mystery of Penrose from the other end. Having disappeared, Penrose unwittingly leaves behind him a legal situation of some complexity, and Mr. Brodribb approaches Thorndyke in the hope that Penrose can be found and the situation clarified. To add to the confusion, it seems that Penrose vanished under slightly chary circumstances, suspected of being responsible for a hit-and-run and discharging himself from hospital against doctor’s orders. He is then never seen again, and only the belongings that he left behind are available to give any sort of clue to his whereabouts.

“The thing is ridiculous. If it had been a question of where he had come from, the coat might have told us something. But obviously it can bear no traces of the place that he intended to go to.”

The novel is, er, novel in this regard in that Thorndyke must work forwards from known facts rather than back, and Freeman is to be commended for both mixing up his palette and allowing our detective to progress by dint of his usual superb methods and reasoning. It really does warm my heart to watch this level of achievable genius work, and when Thorndyke is actually at work — examining the bizarre collection of flotsam that Penrose has laid out in his home museum, or leading an expedition to an ancient barrow — the somewhat prolix telling feels fresh and essential. Alas, the plot is filled out by plenty of what has happened and what it means being restated, and Freeman, in his early 70s when this was written, seems to regress further into his more voluble Victorian tendencies as the book progresses.

And yet, for all its tedious telling, the book has much to its credit. The sense of a world progressing in earnest is tangible here, with Lockhart early on delighting in furniture created by artisans over “new machine-made stuff, turned out by the thousand by people who don’t care a straw what it is like”. Jervis, too, is not above lamenting the march of progress:

I have always liked Queen Square, and have watched, regretfully, its gradual deterioration — or “improvement,” as the optimistic modern phrase has it. When I first knew the place, it was nearly intact, with its satellites, Great Ormond Street, The Foundling Hospital and the group of other pleasant old squares adjacent. As we walked towards it we discussed the changes that the years had wrought. Thorndyke, as an old Londoner, sympathised warmly with my regrets.

Freeman is also to be commended for not only playing fair with the reader but also managing to introduce an element of uncertainty as to the identity of the, er, criminal — I’ll not spoil the nature of the crime — until almost the last moment. Too often, in better-written novels, the scoundrel has been clear to the reader long before the end, and it’s great to see that the old boy still has the ability to muddy the waters. Ponderously, yes, and with such absence of drama as to render the whole thing about as exciting as an Ikea instruction sheet, but muddy the waters nevertheless are. And, look, any time spent with or around “universal fairy godmother” Nathaniel Polton will never be regretted in my house.

I didn’t mean to go on this long, but it matters to me that the reader understands that the problems I have with this book are as much a result of my own addled mind as of the undeniably pleonastic and rather tepid telling. There’s gold here if you’re in a patient mood, and I have a feeling that this is the mindset I’m going to have to take in to the four Thorndyke novels that remain to me. I’ve had such wonderful times in Freeman’s clutches that it would be a shame if these last few titles spent with Thorndyke proved as unsatisfying as this; I promise I’ll do my best to be more considerate next time.

~