A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Overview
by Thomas Baird
J. S. FLETCHER – The Center Temple Homicide. Knopf, hardcover, 1919. Reprinted many instances.
Julian Symons, English creator and critic, coined identify for the multitude of middle-rank thriller writers who lacked literary talent and ingenuity — the Humdrums. J. S. Fletcher stood within the entrance rank of the prolific English phalanx of Humdrums. He wrote over 100 books on a wide range of topics, and the bulk have been detective tales. These melodramas are extraordinarily standard, with the not-too-brilliant central puzzle dominating the story.
They’re a snug affirmation of decency and lawfulness for the moneyed center class. Snobbery descends to racial prejudice (with a number of Chinese language villains), and despicable, evil foreigners have darkish complexions and comical accents. Not a lot scientific detection is concerned, and the tenets of the Golden Age arc not carefully adopted. There’s an excessive amount of reliance on coincidence, detectives lacking particulars, failure to observe up clues, and mysterious figures who seem to wrap up the plot on the finish.
It’s a trifling triumph to pick out one in all Fletcher’s detective tales as his finest. From The Amaranth Membership (1926) to The Yorkshire Moorland Homicide (1930), there’s not a lot to select from, aside from The Center Temple Homicide. Whereas the plot is pretty pedestrian, a lot of Fletcher’s defects are absent. It’s one in all his earliest works, and attracted the primary actual discover for Fletcher in the USA when it was championed by Woodrow Wilson.
The story issues Frank Spargo, subeditor of the Watchman, who occurs to be current when a bludgeoned physique is discovered within the Center Temple. The hotshot reporter (he’s as vibrant as any latterday Flash Casey) groups up with Ronald Breton, barrister, to observe the clues on this devious thriller.
The sufferer is John Marbury, from Australia, who was struck down on his first evening again in London after an absence of a few years. This photograph=procedural novel is a case of sophisticated theft, legacy, parentage, and features a suspected empty coffin. A significant motif (as in lots of Fletcher tales) is railway journey checking timetables; confirming alibis; zipping round to find clues; getaways and pursuits.
Fletcher has been praised for his novels set within the English countryside, however the environment in most of those is overwrought and the descriptions uninteresting. Novels resembling The Center Temple Homicide and The Charing Cross Thriller (1923) are vivid as a result of a lot of the motion takes place within the streets, byways, squares, stations, and buildings of London, and is reported in factual element.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Invoice Pronzini & Marcia Muller and revealed by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Field, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Household Belief.
