JOSEPHINE PULLEIN-THOMPSON – They Died in the Spring. Hammond Hammon & Co., UK, hardcover, 1960. Linford Mystery Library, UK, softcover, 1990. No US edition.

   This is the second of three recorded cases that Chief-Inspector James Flecker of Scotland Yard is known to have worked on. The first was Gin and Murder (1959), the third and final one was Murder Strikes Pink (1963). They Died in the Spring takes place in April, not surprisingly, in a part of England called Bretfordshire, where a retired Colonel has been found shot to death. An accident, it is thought at first – the old gentleman is found fallen in a woods with his shotgun nearby — but gradually it becomes clear that it is a case of murder instead.

   That Colonel Barclay had recently announced his intention to plough over the local cricket field, land which in truth he owned, may have led someone in respond in anger, but the Colonel was the sort of person who seems to have made enemies easily. But what could be the connection between his death and that of a young female German house servant in the neighborhood? The case is too much for the local police force, and Flecker is called in to assist.

   Much of what follows is tedious police work. Lots of questions, lots of answers, not all of which agree which each other, lots of notes taken on the backs of envelopes, lots of conferring with Detective-Sergeant Browning, who is working with Flecker on the case. There is something of a Midsomer Murders feel to the investigation, except that Inspector Barnaby is happily married, while Flecker has regrets.

   From pages 122-123:

   He [Fletcher] felt detached and solitary among the pleasure-seeking family parties and fell to reckoning how old his children would be by now if he and Pauline had stayed together ad had them. […] He shook himself and superimposed the gray shadow of police pay and promotion across his mental picture of the blue and white sitting-room. Though he was a useful backroom boy, he was hardly the sort to rise high; he was too impatient of routine, too unconventional. He’d need superintendent’s pay at least to marry the sort of woman with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life and, by the time he had it, ho would be bald, eccentric and egocentric and have false teeth. He sighed and turned his mind back to the case.

   The case is, one must admit, rather routine, consisting largely of the breaking down of alibis. As an author, Pullein-Thompson seems more adept at describing the local countryside in a fashion that caught my attention more than did the case itself.

   From page 131:

   Ten minutes brought him [Flecker] to the spot in the larch plantation where Colonel Barclay had died, and he stood there for a time, lost in thought. The larches had not yet grown tall enough to shade the track and so, at Flecker’s feet, primroses raised pale, naïve faces and flamboyant dandelions, the extroverts of the spring flowers splashed their exuberant yellow among the grass. It was very quiet; Sunday had stilled the tractors, and Flecker collected the sounds one by one. Somewhere away on the hill a dog barked, there was the distant angry moo of a protesting cow, nearer two birds sang, and in the yellow flowers of a self-sown sallow beside the tracks, the bees droned ceaselessly. Man oughtn‘t to do his dirty work in such places, thought Flecker, he should murder beside the railway line or behind the gasworks, but then he reminded himself that a week ago the woods had not looked like this and that track had been a cold grim place.

   I confess that I didn’t follow the investigation all that closely, but I definitely enjoyed the book, especially the ending, which had nothing to do with nabbing the killer, but which took me by surprise. I had to look back and check to see, but yes, the clues were all there.

R.I.P. JOSEPHINE PULLEIN-THOMPSON (1924-2014). Besides the three Flecker mysteries, Josephine Pullein-Thompson was far better known in England for her pony books written primary for girls. According to her online obituary in The Guardian on 22 June 2014, “In the equestrian novels that she, her mother Joanna Cannan and her younger twin sisters Diana and Christine, wrote – nearly 200 between them – riding horses was also the way that girls could show that they were just as good as boys, if not better. Their heroines relished mucking out stables and the freedom of galloping away across the countryside, and the pluckiest were able to turn bedraggled nags into rosette-winning champions, later returning home to celebrate with a truly ‘supersonic tea’.”

   Joanna Cannan, by the way, was also a mystery writer, with some thirteen works of crime and detective fiction included in Hubin.