THE BACKWARD REVIEWER
William F. Deeck


BRIAN FLYNN – The Billiard-Room Mystery. Macrae Smith, US, hardcover, 1929. Originally published in the UK by John Hamilton, hardcover, 1927.

    It is Cricket Week at Considine Manor. Gathered there are the friends of the son of Sir Charles Considine, and among them is Anthony Bathurst. Bathurst at this point had done no detecting — this is the first novel in which he appears — but he believes he’d be good at it. His opportunity arises when one of the cricketers is found dead in the billiard room, strangled and then stabbed.

BRIAN FLYNN Billiard Room

    The regular policeman is beyond his depth, and even Bathurst struggles for a while putting the clues together. Not quite fair play here, I’d contend, and the writing is Boys’ Own Paper style for the most part, but it is an adequate first effort close on the heels of a similar and certainly a more famous novel written two years earlier by another mystery novelist.

    One does wonder how much influence was wielded by that earlier novel, but Flynn, let’s face it, does not come close to his predecessor.

    An interesting sidelight is Bathurst’s comments on fictional detectives. Like Sherlock Holmes, Bathurst has great contempt for Lecoq, although he admits that Poe’s Dupin wasn’t so bad. When asked if he thinks Holmes stands alone, Bathurst replies:

    “Not altogether … Mason’s M. Hanaud, Bentley’s Trent, Milne’s Mr Gillingham, and, to a lesser degree perhaps, Agatha Christie’s M. Poirot are all excellent in their way, but oh! — the many dozens that aren’t.”

    Someone mentions Bernard Capes’ “Baron” of The Skeleton Key — regrettably unknown to me — G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, and H. C. Bailey’s Reginald Fortune. Bathurst responds:

    “I am willing to accept two,” said Anthony, “but Father Brown — no. He’s too entirely ‘Chestertonian.’ He deduces that the dustman was the murderer because of the shape of the piece that had been cut from the apple pie. I can’t quite get him.”

    Even keeping in mind that Bathurst was talking about detectives who reason, it is a commentary on such judgments that he gave the lowest ratings to the two — Poirot and Father Brown — who remain popular today. Still, how many of us, asked for our own preferences, would do as well after sixty years had passed?

    Let me be frank: I’m still flogging the apparently moribund carcasses of Bailey, Ellery Queen, and S. S. Van Dine.

– From The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 13, No. 3, Summer 1992.



Editorial Comment:   Mystery readers on this side of the Atlantic may be surprised to learn that Anthony Bathurst and author Brian Flynn combined on well over 50 (fictional) murder cases solved by the former and chronicled by the latter. Only a small handful were published in this country. For a complete list, see my review of The Sharp Quillet posted here, earlier on this blog.

    Does anyone recognize the famous novel by another writer that Bill refers to at the end of the second paragraph?