London bookseller turned Lancashire farmer Giles Hoggett takes advantage of a rainy day to turn his back on his wife Katherine’s honey-do list and walk across his fields to check on a fishing cottage sitting on the River Lune. To his surprise he finds a number of unlikely items missing, such as his old raincoat, a hook and chain from the fireplace chimney, and most oddly, the eponymous iron dogs. A humble burglary of seemingly innocuous objects is a long way from bloody murder but Giles gets there, finding the body with the help of the Met in the form of Chief Inspector Robert MacDonald of the CID.
A British Library Crime Classic first published in 1946, republished in the US by the Poisoned Pen Press, the joy of this oldie but goodie is in the meticulous taking of statements from the assorted cast and comparing how well they align. Fun, too, is MacDonald inviting Giles to invent his own.
“It evidently entertains you to make up a story which fits the facts. I wonder of your ingenuity will work to the extent of producing a story which accounts for the various factors we have been considering? It isn’t altogether an idle question. You know this place, and you are observant of your fellows. It may be that you will tell me something useful when you are least aware of it.”
When’s the last time you heard any detective say that to a witness? Giles makes up a pretty good story but of course he gets it all wrong. Reeves, MacDonald’s Met backup, says
“There’s nearly always some sense in real life stories…If a chap like Ginner with a Cockney accent like mine and lodgings in Pimlico gets his ticket in a place like this, miles from anywhere, it’s not just chance. There’s always a connection somewhere.”
as ably demonstrated by Katherine.
“Have you realized what the murderer’s initial mistake was—the thing that really gave him away? It was interfering with Giles’s woodpile and leaving the logs tumbled about. If it hadn’t been for that, Giles wouldn’t have come inside the cottage that day.”
Nor is it often that detectives pause on the way to arresting the murderer to admire the view.
It was a memorable sight on that remote fell-side; the harvest moon, past the full now, was shedding a white light over the rolling moorland, wave beyond wave of heather, bilberry and rough pasture like a sea whitened by the moonlight, with densest shadows etched in the hollows. The stars were brilliant in the cloudless sky, and Macdonald turned to see the Plough in the north-west, the Pole star overhead, and Cassiopeia and Gemini glittering in the north athwart the sky, with Pegasus and Aries to the south. It was moments like that which made up for the more sordid commonplace of detection routine…
To which I can only add a profound amen. A slow burn crime fiction read set in a rural location in a time less ridden with technology.
Book Review Monday Chatter Uncategorized E.C.R. Lorac The Theft of the Iron Dogs