Rennie Airth’s first John Madden mystery, River of Darkness, published ten years ago, was set in 1921. His second, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, was set in 1932 and this, the third and reputedly the last, takes place in the closing months of 1944. The series spans, therefore, more than 20 years. In the first, Inspector Madden of Scotland Yard solves some gruesome country-house murders. He is a man still much troubled by his experience in the trenches, but during the case he meets and falls in love with Dr Helen Blackwell, who becomes his wife.
By the time of the second book he has retired from the police, and has a farm in Surrey where he lives contentedly with Helen and their two children. So in this latest book years have passed since he was an operational detective — an unusual state of affairs for the main character of a crime series. However, as loyal readers will know, retired though John Madden may be, he has a habit of finding crime, and major crime at that, on his doorstep, and so it proves to be.
A Polish girl, Rosa Nowak, who had been working on his farm as a land girl, is garrotted in Bloomsbury while on a visit to her aunt in London. It is November 1944 and the blackout is very much in place. Round Rosa’s body, even embedded in her hair, are struck matches; the murderer had been attempting to see something on or about his victim. A French prostitute based in Soho is murdered next — the clean brutal garrotte again — and then a group of small-time crooks is massacred in a pub in Wapping during an attack by a V-1 buzz bomb.
Assistant Commissioner Sir Wilfred Bennett, Chief Inspector Angus Sinclair, his retirement deferred because of the war, Billy Styles — all familiar from the earlier books, as is Ransom, the pathologist — are by turns quick and slow in piecing together the clues. An energetic and bumptious young woman PC, Lily Poole, is drawn into the case, to the mild horror of the older officers. A connection is made with a murder in Fontainebleau several years earlier, and the Sûreté in Paris, with no great alacrity, sends over a package of papers to Scotland Yard. John Madden, wise old bird, keeps in touch with his former colleagues and makes some crucial deductions himself. But the assassin is, as ever, one step ahead.
The comfortable, leisurely rhythm of Rennie Airth’s writing and the affectionate way in which he conveys wartime Britain are very pleasurable. The knowledge that the police are wholly to be trusted, that the cockney mother who helps with information has a heart of gold, that characters are straight and true, is all reassuring and slightly unsettling, cynics that we are. There is little deviation from type. This is a world of ‘grins’ and ‘chums’ and ‘chuckles’, of bicycles and rations, of bonhomie and respect. You are deep in middle-class Miss Marple territory, though the book is no pastiche. If you like your detective fiction with a dose of nostalgia, or if you are already a John Madden fan, then this latest mystery will not disappoint. In its particular and unusual way it is, once again, very well done.
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