Maura (maura853) -
Helpful Score: 1
Clunky mystery, but charming look at life in the North Lake District in the mid-1930s, when cars and lorries would have been a bit of a novelty, so the idea of murder committed to protect a petrol delivery racket might have seemed very exotic and high-tech indeed.
Even making allowances for the tastes and attitudes of the time, the investigation of the mysterious death in an isolated petrol station near Bassenthwaite Water, near Keswick in Cumberland (now Cumbria) was glacially slow, repetitious and, dare I say it, a bit dumb. One painstakingly pursued element of the investigation reads like the sort of questions I remember from 6th Grade maths tests:
"If a petrol lorry holds 1000 gallons of petrol, and stops 4 times to makes deliveries of 200 gallons, how many times must Inspector Meredith hide in the bushes near the lorry's final stop of the day before he realizes ..."
And Meredith is a piece o'work. Described by the author in the glowingest of terms -- efficient, industrious, intelligent ... Trust me, he's not. He "forgets" crucial bits of evidence, and misses connections that would be obvious to a 5-year-old, only coming to hard-won "eureka" moments after much painful rumination and sucking on his pipe. He is high-handed and rude to his "inferiors," and grovelling to his superiors. He (and therefore, we the readers) must sit patiently while his superior suck thoughtfully on =their= pipes and mansplain his own investigation to him. Consequently, we are told everything about three times. And it wasn't very interesting their first time ...
HOWEVER, I stuck with it, and even enjoyed it, in a frustrated sort of way, because of the location and the sense of a very different time. Although Bude isn't a great one for description (unless it's to do with Meredith's consistently excellent lunches), there's enjoyable local colour, covering the glorious area west of Penrith, toward Bassenthwaite, which is the territory of Meredith's investigations. And the period detail, all the better for not being "period," but written when it was all very natural that a police Inspector might leap into a motorcycle sidecar to pursue the bad'uns, a retired India Army man could be named Colonel Rickshaw, and no one would even blink, and a young man might very naturally sport a "Hitler Moustache" ....
Even making allowances for the tastes and attitudes of the time, the investigation of the mysterious death in an isolated petrol station near Bassenthwaite Water, near Keswick in Cumberland (now Cumbria) was glacially slow, repetitious and, dare I say it, a bit dumb. One painstakingly pursued element of the investigation reads like the sort of questions I remember from 6th Grade maths tests:
"If a petrol lorry holds 1000 gallons of petrol, and stops 4 times to makes deliveries of 200 gallons, how many times must Inspector Meredith hide in the bushes near the lorry's final stop of the day before he realizes ..."
And Meredith is a piece o'work. Described by the author in the glowingest of terms -- efficient, industrious, intelligent ... Trust me, he's not. He "forgets" crucial bits of evidence, and misses connections that would be obvious to a 5-year-old, only coming to hard-won "eureka" moments after much painful rumination and sucking on his pipe. He is high-handed and rude to his "inferiors," and grovelling to his superiors. He (and therefore, we the readers) must sit patiently while his superior suck thoughtfully on =their= pipes and mansplain his own investigation to him. Consequently, we are told everything about three times. And it wasn't very interesting their first time ...
HOWEVER, I stuck with it, and even enjoyed it, in a frustrated sort of way, because of the location and the sense of a very different time. Although Bude isn't a great one for description (unless it's to do with Meredith's consistently excellent lunches), there's enjoyable local colour, covering the glorious area west of Penrith, toward Bassenthwaite, which is the territory of Meredith's investigations. And the period detail, all the better for not being "period," but written when it was all very natural that a police Inspector might leap into a motorcycle sidecar to pursue the bad'uns, a retired India Army man could be named Colonel Rickshaw, and no one would even blink, and a young man might very naturally sport a "Hitler Moustache" ....
