Lorac (a pseudonym for someone with the middle name "Carol", hence the fake last name, wrote a LOT of books, so I'll be featuring many of those. Not all but many feature a Scotland Yard detective by the name Macdonald (yes, the D is small) and his trusty worker bee Reeves who is younger and therefore willing to throw himself into rivers, off roofs or through windows--whatever it takes to catch the bad guy. Macdonald is Scottish and can affect a lilting Scottish burr on a dime and he uses that to his advantage as English people seem to assume that someone with a strong Scotland accent is a moron.
This story takes place in London during WWII and, yes, it's another story that very much relies on the Pea Soup Fog to ensure that streets are unnaturally empty at night and that no one can have a real good look at the bad guy sneaking around. As with Brand's books, the murder victim is a much loathed individual. He is an old, miserly codger who owns an old Victorian (does that mean large?) house that everyone who sees it says, "Wow, this was a beautiful house once...who's the asshole that refused to keep it up?" Well, our murder victim, that's who. And like Ebeneezer Scrooge, the guy is LOADED (literally spends his evenings in bed because it's the only room with furniture in it, counting out his bills and coins while cackling) yet pretends to be poor so that a genuinely poor good natured char lady--after working a 12 hour shift to support herself--cleans his house and makes his meals for free. She tells Macdonald that she would not THINK of charging that poor man for the little bit of her food that she shares with him! (Sap.) More saps: the young artists who rent a "loft" from him for an outrageous rent rate that they can't afford and the room has no heat, broken windows and rising damp on all the walls. So, clearly he needs to go and he is finished off very early on--one clean bullet to the head. It COULD be suicide but the gunshot is right through the front of his head and the gun was cleaned and placed far from his body. So, murder it is.
The only suspects are the saintly (or is she?) char lady Mrs. Tubbs, the two renters (brother and sister artists--he's slovenly and she's constantly getting him out of scrapes both financial and personal), a model/actor who is posing for the brother while wearing a costume he "borrowed" from the theatre he somehow managed to get a play part with, and two guys who are "squares" (civil servants) who spend the whole evening playing an intense game of chess. (Ah! Now the title of the book makes sense.) The important events take place between 8:45 pm and 9:10 pm and all four men vouch that none could have left the room as each were in one another's sight; Mrs. Tubbs COULD have done it but why would she and if she was going to do it, why before going home would she stop by the loft to check up on the artists and chess players to tell them that she had just given the "poor old dear" his dinner, locked his door as she left and then left his front door key on their table; the sister who was in the room with the four men the whole time except for the "brief " minute she went outside to verify that the blackout curtains were really working (she didn't want to get another 5 pound fine for light spilling out through the broken glass), and....the fly in the soup: a Canadian soldier who is one leave for two days so came to London to visit his uncle to make sure he was all right and instead found him stone cold dead with an empty cash box!
Again, we have a bunch of people lying for one another for all sorts of silly reasons and a (seemingly) impossible murder, yet clearly someone had to do it. Reeves gets to crawl over walls, drain a giant dugout (an incomplete bomb shelter that allows rain water to pool), dart around on rooftops and charm crotchety nosy neighbor ladies who see more than they are willing to admit.
And two of the characters are heavy dope users and so particularly unreliable.
There are a lot of false clues, of course, and likely suspects who turn out to have rock solid alibis--one because he died in an air raid 12 months earlier. The main reason those locals are suspects is that they are petty criminals conning people out of their rations (working cons that really didn't make sense to me: apparently there were fabric coupons and truckloads of those coupons were being diverted to...I'm not sure but the main point is that a lot of hard work was being put into making a few bucks so that the con artists could avoid working hard). The fact that these young men "weren't giving it to "ole 'itler" was another reason everyone hated them.
Macdonald seems to have a 6th sense for smelling out murderers as he is always right and is able to connect dots that no one else can see. (Including Reeves who really does try.) One feature of all the Lorac books that I've read so far--and, as I said, there are LOADS of them--is that Macdonald expends a LOT of energy ensuring that there is plenty of evidence to prove who did NOT commit the murder, but not much to prove who DID commit the murder. So Macdonald likes to contrive set ups that "encourage" the murderer(s) to take the honorable way out, thus saving their embarassed family and friends the distress of a murder trial--which, we are told, will just end with a hanging anyway, so isn't it better if the killer does one more killing for the right reasons? I'm not sure I accept this line of thought since in this story the murderer is clearly unhinged and really shouldn't be found mentally capable of going to trial. But it does allow for the story to wrap up neatly and quickly. And it's interesting how quickly family members and friends resign themselves to the death of someone that not 10 minutes earlier they were certain was as innocent as a newborn babe. But, once the facts are laid out for them, they shrug and say, "Well, what can you do?" and then go back to their business.
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