The Middle Temple Murder

There was a time when a journalist upon putting the late-night edition of his newspaper ‘to bed’, could walk a short way from Fleet Street, and find himself in the alleys and lanes of the legal world (where barristers and bachelors had their chambers) in the Middle Temple.

Sometimes on that walk they would find a body, like Frank Spargo of The Watchman newspaper comes upon the police, who have just discovered a body. A middle-aged man lies bludgeoned and all his possessions stolen from him, making identification (difficult but not impossible). He is a visitor to London, has been seen talking to at least one other person he knew, and has visited a safety deposit store. His box, though, when it is opened, proves to be empty. Puzzle upon puzzle has been presented, and seems to be solved, only for more puzzles to emerge, and we are barely a quarter of a way into the story.

J S Fletcher’s The Middle Temple Murder was published at the end of the First World War (whether 1918 or 1919, remains uncertain) and was the making of him, as a best-selling author. In the USA President Woodrow Wilson popularised this book in the same way President Kennedy became associated with the James Bond series forty years later. Wilson was probably right for a couple of reasons – firstly, although the story develops some Victorian melodrama (Fletcher had already been writing for twenty years), it manages to keep its plotting and detection going all the way, while most Victorians such as Conan Doyle and the authors of the Rivals of Sherlock Holmes rarely managed to turn from detective short stories to detective novels (three of the four Holmes novels are padded with backstories, for instance). Secondly, although the story concentrates on Spargo as the detective, it does not assume that the police are incompetent, and police discoveries advance the story, too.

Along with miserable crimes that once ruined provincial towns, like much nineteenth century literature the plot depends on men who have left the country years before and returned. Those are changed men – what they have not expected is that the people who ruined them are still in a position to do so: if you know Dickens’ David Copperfield then there are Rosa Dartle and Uriah Heap characters unrecognised. The solution wraps up with at least one villain potentially escaping justice, though Spargo identifies the murderer. Modern readers, meanwhile, may be more interested in the relationship of those at the death-bed scene which precedes it.  That makes The Middle Temple Murder another welcome title in the Crime Club reprint series.