REVIEWED BY DOUG GREENE:

   

WILL SCOTT – Giglamps. Cassell, UK, hardcover, 1924. No US edition.

   I have seldom enjoyed a book more than Giglamps, a collection of short stories about a tramp who sometimes acts as detective and sometimes runs afoul of the law himself — all told with rare warmth and humor. Giglamps himself is a marvelous character:

   He was sockless, tieless, collarless and shaveless. His attire was a pair of inadequate trousers, a cutaway coat that had once belonged to somebody else — and probably did still — and a straw hat that could not imaginably ever have belonged to anybody. Twenty in heart, sixty in experience, he was somewhere between the two in years. By inclination he was always disinclined. By profession he did not practise any.

   Will Scott’s style is Chestertonian in its use of paradox and unexpected juxtaposition of ideas, but it avoids GKC’s atmospheric preoccupations and occasional obscurity,

   “The Vanishing Rouse,” the first story in Giglamps, has two mysteries. First, why did someone steal Giglamp’s dilapidated boots and replace them with “good boots; great boots; boots worthy of being sung, fit to pass into the epics and the legends of highway and casual ward”? Second, how can a house simply disappear like smoke?

   Eavesdropping outside a small house in the middle of a field, Giglamps witnesses a murder, When he brings the law to the scene, however. there is no house to be found. This fine tale, filled with humor and a variety of incidents, is damaged only by the unlikelihood that no sign whatever would have been left of the removal of the house.

   Just as good a story is “A Holiday By the Sea,” in which Giglamps consciously becomes a detective and discovers a completely unexpected crime. Most of the other stories do not have pure detection, but in each one Giglamps has to resolve some sort of problem.

   EQ did not know of Giglamps; if he had, the book surely would have been a Queen’s Quorum choice.

– Reprinted from The Poison Pen, Volume 6, Number 1 (Spring 1984). Permission granted by Doug Greene.

   

      Contents:

The Battle of Sideways · ss Pan Jan 1923
The End of the Road · ss Pan Jul 1923, as “Good-bye Giglamps”?
Giglamps in Eden · ss Pan Apr 1923
A Holiday by the Sea · ss Pan Aug 1922
Medals for It · ss Pan Oct 1922
Meeting of Creditors · ss Pan May 1923, as “Giglamps Meets His Creditors”
One in a Million · ss
Roads to Rome · ss Pan Sep 1922
Too Much Mercury · ss Pan Jun 1923
Trussed to Luck · ss Pan Dec 1922
The Vanishing House · ss
When Snakes Were Ladders · ss Pan Nov 1922
A Wish for a Cigar · ss Pan Mar 1923, as “Giglamps Revokes”