Wed 20 Nov 2013
Reviewed by William F. Deeck: Two Sergeant Beef Mysteries by LEO BRUCE.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[2] Comments
William F. Deeck
LEO BRUCE – Case with No Conclusion. Academy Chicago, paperback, 1984. First published in the UK by Bles, 1939.
William Beef, former sergeant in the police force, has retired and taken up private investigation from quarters near Baker Street. Lionel Townsend, who recorded Beef’s previous two investigations, asserts that any claim that Beef “should be able to earn a living as a private investigator was beyond all human credulity.”
Nonetheless, a client reasonably prompt!y appears, one Peter Ferrers, whose brother has been arrested for murdering a doctor. The doctor’s body was found in Stewart Ferrers’ library, with Stewart’s knife in the corpse’s throat and only Stewart’s fingerprints on the knife. There had, as is usual in such cases, been a violent quarrel between the two men only hours before. But what means the whiskey in the library that had been adulterated with arsenic?
Beef does an excellent job of investigating in his own inimitable manner and concludes that Stewart Ferrers is indeed not guilty. Beef is, however, unable to prove that Ferrers didn’t do it or to apprehend the someone else who did do it.
There is consternation, of course, among mystery writers and amateur detectives. As one publisher put it, “If novelists’ investigators cannot solve the problems created, who in the world can?” Monsieur Amer Picon, who appeared in Beef’s first major investigation, Case for Three Detectives, and who bears a distinct resemblance to Hercule Poirot, reacted this way: “Helas! Mon Dieu. Je ne sais quoi.”
Such a failure by an amateur investigator is certainly unprecedented, and this may have been why Case with No Conclusion was not published in the US until 1984, whereas the next book in the series, Case with Four Clowns, a considerably lesser mystery, did find a publisher here in 1939.
Suffice it to say that there is more here than meets the eye, but reviewers rules do not permit that additional information to be disclosed. Read and enjoy.
LEO BRUCE – Case with Four Clowns. Frederick A. Stokes, US, hardcover, 1940. Academy Chicago, US, paperback, 2010. First published in the UK by Davies, hardcover, 1939.
Sergeant William Beef, formerly of the police force, is now in unwilling retirement as a private investigator because of his last investigation, Case with No Conclusion. Beef was unable to prove that the man charged with a murder had not done it, although Beef was certain that the man had not committed the crime.
No one will hire Beef, but he gets a note from his nephew, who is traveling with a circus. The nephew says he has been told by a gypsy fortune teller that there will be a murder at the circus.
Beef manages to talk Lionel Townsend, the doubting chronicler of his investigations, into joining him in a tour with the circus. There Beef uncovers lots of enmities and jealousies, what might be an attempt at murder, and several “accidents” that could have been efforts at homicide.
Despite a great deal of confusion and conflict, Beef, using his vast common sense, manages to make sense of the case. A murder does occur, but it’s not Beef’s fault.
Circus fans should enjoy this one, and so should Beef admirers. I found it a bit slow, but Beef’s comments about mystery writers and amateur detectives kept me entertained. Townsend as chronicler is always amusing, as when he seriously tells Beef:
“… Before we started on this business I had my eye on a young lady school-teacher in Murston who, I have been told, solves every interesting crime by an algebraic process which she works out during her scripture classes. She would, I believe, have made an excellent investigator for me to chronicle, instead of wasting my time running in and out of public-houses after you.”
Why Beef puts up with Townsend and vice versa is as big a mystery as any that Beef has investigated.
November 20th, 2013 at 1:24 pm
Many thanks should go to Academy Chicago for making most if not all of Leo Bruce’s mysteries available in inexpensive paperback form. I do not believe they are available as ebooks. If you know otherwise, please leave a comment below.
November 20th, 2013 at 3:46 pm
Steve
I’ll have to check around and see if these are available as e-books. For all the wonderful stuff that is available there are still gaps, though they are closing.
I loved Bruce in all his guises, as the author of the Beef stories, the Carolous Deane mysteries, and under his own name Rupert Croft Cooke (Seven Thieves — at least that’s the title I remember it by — was a stunning crime novel and a pretty good Brit noir film with Stephen Boyd).
I suppose Bruce’s somewhat jaundiced eye toward the genre and his quietly barbed humor got under the skin of some who may not have seen the irony of the case going unsolved (though there is precedent in short detective stories). In anyone else hands I would hesitate to read a book I knew ended that way, but not Bruce and Beef.
That’s no mean tribute to Bruce’s reputation that people still purchased a book that tells you it has no conclusion in the title. I’m not sure even I would have bought The Case Perry Mason Couldn’t Solve or Hercule Poirot’s Greatest Failure — at least not for any reason but being a completest.
And, yes, Academy Chicago did a fine job and deserves much credit. They provided me with a good many handsome well made paperback editions of books it was hard to find this side of the pond. Several publishers did this in the 80’s bringing into print many a book I had only read about and hoped to one day read. I don’t know about collectors but it was a great era for readers.