Not to split hairs, but if you receive an anonymous note on the 1st June telling you that you have thirteen days to live, the person threatening your life is going to kill you on 14th June, not the 13th. Either way, the wealthy George Hayling waits the best part of a week, receiving one note a day along similar lines — including a threat to poison his dog, which is duly carried out — before consulting the police. As luck would have it, he’s ushered into the office of Chief Inspector Floyd just as that worthy is completing a discussion with the esteemed Sir Arthur Sinclair, and something about Hayling’s case piques Sinclair’s interest. Only, with so little time remaining, can Sinclair keep the man alive?

Death Turns Traitor (1935) is the eleventh book by Walter S. Masterman that I’ve read, and I still don’t know what to make of him. The context of the idea herein — that in 1935 the powers of Europe have agreed a secret treaty to preclude war, yet an influential German secret society called the DUA is doing its best to foment discontent and push the continent over the edge — is fascinating, and Masterman writes some affectingly moody prose, but somehow the two just don’t quite come together. The shortfall is, perhaps, an absence of incident to fill out these 60,000 words, rendering much of what passes somewhat telescoped and thus veering into tediousness.

I’ve read a lot of middle-of-the-road books lately, so thought I’d take away the pressure of expecting something to be good and read an author who is, at the very least, usually entertaining if nothing else.  And so The Nameless Crime (1932), the next Walter S. Masterman title on my TBR, comes into its own. Masterman’s Victorian tendencies — you can imagine his novels filmed in flickery black and white, with title cards for dialogue — prove oddly comforting, despite his plot structure at time leaning into the more infuriating end of the spectrum, and any preconceptions going in tending to get lost in the melee.  So how do we fare this time around? Not well.

Jack Reid, posing for the last few weeks as a holidaying artist, breaks into Severinge Abbey one night with the intent of relieving its chapel of its more valuable contents, only to half-witness in the darkness the murder of Lord Henry Severinge by an unknown hand. Feigning ignorance, Reid returns to the Abbey the next day to find that the body has disappeared, and suggests that they use the bloodhounds of the Severinge’s neighbour Colonel Graham to track down the missing man. When the body is discovered in an Ellery Queenian hiding place, the small matter of who could plan such a diabolical crime, and to what end, comes into question.