The Murder in Bethnal Square by Sydney Fowler

The Murder in Bethnal Square by Sydney Fowler

published 1938

 

I recently did a post on another of Sydney Fowler’s books, The Attic Murders, and while reading this one I at first thought it might not be worth a blogpost.

However, a major character is a pregnant young woman, and it is surprisingly rare for me to get the chance to illustrate maternity clothes, so here we go. The item above is designed to work both ways – so belted at first (and after birth) then getting looser as the months roll by.

Elle magazine produced a wonderful slideshow of maternity clothes which is my goto in these matters:

How Maternity Style Has Changed Over the Years

Bethnal Square, like Attic, is quite the jumble – as one of the comments on the first one said, ‘where’s the editor?’ Sydney Fowler, who wrote dozens of books, doesn’t seem like someone who went over them much, or showed them to anyone else. He certainly wouldn’t have survived long at a modern, structured creative writing course… he’d be breaking too many rules.

A very dubious character, Henry Coldwater, has been found dead in his office: he was a moneylender, a blackmailer, a receiver of stolen goods. Many people had a motive to harm him. The story starts with a young couple: she has been blackmailed, he is known to have attacked and threatened Coldwater. Both saw him on the day of his death. But there is a list of other people who came to visit him too, and the investigations go on in a rather random way, featuring Inspector Combridge and the fussy solicitor Mr Jellipot. The dead man’s clerk, Theophilus Flipp, seems to be up to no good.

Attention is focussed on a family in lodgings: Mrs Renshaw, her son Bobby, and her stepdaughter Jessica. As in the previous book, people have far too many names: all these three have different last names, not very convincingly.  Jessica is the daughter of one of Mrs Renshaw’s dead husbands, by a previous marriage, so it is not clear why she doesn’t share a name with anyone.

There was a fair amount of money going in and out of the office on the day, and this leads to the most boring trail you have ever seen in a Golden Age detective story.

“But when I took [the banknote], I thought he was keeping the balance – the five pounds. When I heard he was meaning to give Mother that to make up the rent, I made him take back one of the notes, and in the end he got it changed, and gave me seven pounds and kept three for himself.”…

This explanation did not give [the inspector] the vital information he sought.

No, really? There are pages and pages of this, as he visits every character in the book to ask about the blooming banknotes, and I’m not sure it’s very important in the end.

The young man is considered as a serious suspect, and the inspector wonders if Bob’s moral code would let him commit murder. Let us take a look at his workings, shall we?

The iron-hard division of right and wrong that allowed no latitude either to compromise or condone, the religion that drew much of its vitality from the older scriptures the Founder of Christianity had so sharply condemned, to what extremity might they not stir a mind that was young, emotional, rigid in its intellectual narrowness, and with its hatred of sinner and sin generously confused with sympathy for the companion of his childhood who had been betrayed in a shameful way?

And  you thought Lord Peter Wimsey was the intellectual and moral investigator. (Points for anyone who was not surprised on arriving at a question mark at the end of the sentence)

There are moments almost of humour: ‘in recommending a girl to purchase a business it is not usual to consider the risk of her seduction by the estate-agent concerned.’

And it is readable enough, when not tied up in banknotes and religious scruples. There are two unveilings of villainy – both more or less just announced to the reader – not tremendously surprising, but the very last page is very satisfying.

Much of the action revolves around a stationery shop, and I found this splendid picture of one at the National Library of Ireland.