Ronald Shoulter has been found shot in the appropriately-named Deadman’s Wood, and his sister refuses to believe the police’s easy assumption of suicide.  While “[t]he fashion was for detectives of high social standing and large private incomes”, she “won’t have one of these pansified snobs who are supposed to be brilliant investigators hanging around” and seeks out ex-Sergeant William Beef to get to the bottom of things. And so Lionel Townsend, Beef’s Boswell for four previous cases, finds himself once again, though more unwillingly this time, drawn in to the matter of a devious murder that the earthy Sergeant must untangle.

Following the revelation at the end of my recent review of Case for Three Detectives (1936) by Leo Bruce that I had not read three of sometime-Sergeant William Beef’s later cases, a friend has staged an intervention and leant me Case with Ropes and Rings (1940), Neck and Neck (1951), and Cold Blood (1952). So let’s mop these three up, and then I can turn my eye upon rereading the earlier titles which have not yet made it onto The Invisible Event. Today, the death by hanging of a popular boy at Penshurt public school raises Beef’s suspicion of murder and, figuring that the boy’s wealthy father might be remuneratively grateful, Beef and his chronicler Lionel Townsend descend on Penshurt and begin to investigate.