Another good murder mystery with great story telling. This book is widely considered Gilbert's finest novel but since I haven't read several dozen of his books I'm in no position to say. It is set in a law office (published in 1950) and so, given that he worked in a law office for about 40 years, it's safe to say that he is in his element. So not only are we treated to a ripping yarn but we get to see how a high profile London law office operated 76 years ago.
The basic idea is that Henry Bohun (our protagonist) was recently hired to work at a law firm that regards itself as one of the more prestigious offices in London. We start with him bright and early on his first day when he is just meeting everyone and finding his feet. The reason there is an opening is because one of their senior partners, Mr. Horniman, died from heart disease recently. Bohun is a bit of an odd nut, having bounced from subject to subject (studying medicine, accounting and then law in addition to spending some time in the military) and so while young to his profession, he isn't wet behind the ears. The office has an odd atmosphere since everyone's every single action is absurdly regimented by The Horniman System: a method of annotating and storing legal documents that is overly detailed and ridiculously complex. Every client has a card with their name as well as dozens of letters and numbers that are codes that tell you the dates of events, quantity and nature of letters written and received, topics addressed, problems solved and problems remaining. Each client--with their obscenely inflated piles of folders, letter copies and notes is assigned to a long coffin (!!!) shaped file. And each file is hermetically sealed (so no silverfish, damp, rats or nosy Nancies are going to get to those files and damage, eat or steal them) and locked with a series of keys that only two people have: the lawyer who worked for that client and the office security guard who opens up and locks down the office every day.
As Bohun meets each person we get a sense of not only how a work day goes but also the mood of the place. The office has seven lawyers, each of whom has various axes to grind about the others, generally because each is convinced that they are the only one who works a full day and actually earns their salary. It also has five secretaries, three assigned to the senior partners (at least until one died) and the rest are shared among the remaining lawyers. The one who was assigned to Horniman now works for all the lawyers and she regards this as seriously beneath her. The fact that Horniman Junior was hired to "replace" Horniman Senior does not lessen her resentment as Horniman Junior is widely considered to be a wholly incompent lawyer who isn't even trying to cover that fact up. (He spends all his time at the seaside on his boat, dreaming of stocking trout. I mean, really!) There are also two staff people, the security guard I already mentioned and a cashier.
Gilbert's special talent is shifting the storytelling from one person to the next so we cycle from room to room, finding some people farfing around while others gripe about others farfing around, some innocently flirting and others making thinly veiled insults and threats. And just as we start to get a handle on the lay of the land in one room with one pair of people, one character interrupts themself and says, "Was that a scream I just heard?" Then we move to another room, travel back in time a bit, find out how this office pair operates, and, again, one says to the other, "I say, was that a scream?" And round and round we go until we finally get to the nexus of the matter: three people (Horniman Junior, Miss Cornell who is the female character voted "most likely to scream hysterically until someone soundly slaps her," and the security guard Sergeant Cockerill) who have used blunt force to open up a file that no one had the key to and finding no files but instead a dead body crammed inside.
The body, Mr. Smallbone (hence the name of the novel), is both an unimportant client and a trustee for a very large (half a million pounds!!!) and extremely important trust fund. Senior Horniman was the only other trustee. Well, that opens up a lot of sticky legal issues: who manages the money if both are dead? how was the money being managed? was Smallbone murdered because of something he knew--or something he did? Unfortunately, not one single file concerning Smallbone or the trust is anywhere to be found--which means someone worked very hard to (a) eliminate all records of the legal issues concerning Smallbone and (b) eliminate Smallbone as well. To deal with (b), we have the arrival of Inspector Hazlerigg of Scotland Yard. Apparently this is the Inspector's 4th time appearing in a novel by Gilbert but I haven't read those books so he is new to me. He's another example of the perfectly competent Scotland Yard inspector that populates all these cozy murder mysteries. Imagine how crap all these novels woud be if they had American police detectives? As for (a), Bohun is the obvious choice because (1) since it's his first day of the job he is off the suspect list (it's estimated that Smallbone has been dead 4-8 weeks--remember, the file was hermetically sealed), and (2) he's a lawyer and an accountant, so he'll be able to make both heads and tails of whatever he finds concerning the trust.
Of course everyone assumes that Senior Horniman was up to some financial larking about, spending trust money to save the law office during the lean war years and then shaving funds from other accounts to secretly restore the trust balance. That is, until Body 2 appears! Well, that means that the murderer is not only alive but is desperate: their dream that Smallbone (an annoying albeit unimportant person in the grand scheme of things) would remain stuffed in a file for centuries was smashed and now they are against a wall and lashing out. Who are they and will they kill again?
I'm not going to give away anymore as it's extremely tightly plotted with no end of false clues and fabricated alibis. While the mystery is good, the best part of the novel is the conversations behind closed doors in the various offices--after all, with two dead bodies within a few days, it's pretty difficult to do anything else except throw people you hate under a bus in the hopes that they get arrested for murder.
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