A REVIEW BY CURT J. EVANS:         


MILES BURTON – Death Visits Downspring. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1941. UK edition published as Up the Garden Path, Collins Crime Club, hardcover, 1941.

    “Death Visits Downspring is the first book Miles Burton has written with a wartime background, and it stands at the head of his list of cleverly plotted, well-characterized Scotland Yard stories. This new book has the added appeal of topical interest and an authentically portrayed background of a little village under bombardment.”

— Publishers blurb for Death Visits Downspring.


MILES BURTON Death Visits Downspring

   It was 1941, the war clearly was here to stay for some time, and Americans evidently were ready to read about it in their English detective fiction. John Dickson Carr had placed Murder in the Submarine Zone (Nine–And Death Makes Ten) the year before, and in 1941 Agatha Christie would ask her readers the tantalizing question N or M? while Margery Allingham would investigate a Traitor’s Purse.

   For his part, John Street that year contributed two wartime detective novels with espionage elements, one a “John Rhode,” They Watched by Night (Signal for Death), the other, the title under review here, a Miles Burton. While They Watched by Night is the better of the two tales, Death Visits Downspring makes an entertaining read. (I use the American title to distinguish the book from a 1949 John Rhode novel that in England also used the title Up the Garden Path!)

   The novel opens with murder appearing at night on the doorstep of Downspring’s own police sergeant. His wife and a woman friend of hers are discussing the upcoming dance in aid of the Comforts Fund (we learn the “Raggle Taggle Band” has been engaged — apparently a good thing!) when a knock is heard at the door.

   Mr. Noakes, the butler at Valley View, the local great house, has come to talk to the police sergeant, but the latter man was called away suddenly. As a disappointed Noakes leaves and the police sergeant’s wife shuts the door behind him, he is violently struck down. Murder!

   Inspector Arnold is sent by the Yard to take over the case and, being Arnold, he fails to make much progress for much of the novel. (Arnold actually does manage to solve several solo cases — apparently Street wanted to show that miracles can happen occasionally.)

   Meanwhile, there is a second murder — another bludgeoning — and it appears that somewhere in the neighborhood intelligence is being transmitted to the enemy. (German planes periodically drop bombs and engage in aerial fights during the story.)

   Miles Burton’s brilliant amateur gentleman detective, Desmond Merrion, is working in intelligence for the duration of the war (as Street himself once did) and he arrives on the scene in the last 40% of the novel to put an end to the espionage and, incidentally, solve the murders too.

   Miles Burton’s novels often tend to be fairly cozy affairs, and Death Visits Downspring is no exception to this general rule. As usual, Street writes with authority about village life (“The inspector’s experience had taught him that when a native said it as impossible to lose the way it turned out to be exceptionally difficult to find”), and much of the pleasure to be derived from the novel comes from its authentic atmosphere.

   No real gentry appear, despite the fact there is a great house, Valley View, in the vicinity. Valley View, we learn, is modernistic barracks of a place that was built built by a wealthy, knighted pickle king who has passed on to that great cannery in the sky; and it is now occupied by strangers from London, crippled Alvar Dorn, his striking daughter Roma and their three pugnacious Cockney maids.

   Similarly, at nearby Brook Bungalow live other relative newcomers, romance novelist Ellen Daintry and her evacuated, rambunctious nephew, Peter. Additional characters like Captain Baldock, tradesman Mr. Fisherton, commercial traveler Charlie Gatwick and market gardener Reuben Pentecost are not exactly out of the top drawer, and they are none the less interesting for that!

   In the novel there are two mysteries: who committed the murders and how exactly is information transmitted to the enemy. While neither mystery is fiendishly difficult for the seasoned reader, both should provide sufficient entertainment to the mystery buff. Combining these mysteries with the wartime village atmosphere, John Street gave readers an enjoyable detective novel.