The Last Escape

by E.C.R. Lorac

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 152
Rating:

Synopsis:

In this final detective novel to feature Superintendent Robert MacDonald, we find the police officer setting up his retirement plans on a hill farm to the south of Lunesdale. Not quite ready to retire, he buys the farm and installs a young couple to oversee his property while he's away detecting. Meanwhile, one foggy morning Rory Macshane who has just finished his first year of a 10-year prison sentence at Dartmoor sees his plans for escape come to fruition. He has hidden away bits and pieces of this and that over the past year and when the fog begins to thicken while he out on a work-gang he takes advantage of it and disappears into the mist with enough gear to help him truly escape.

About a month after the prison break, MacDonald accompanies the farmer who has been renting the adjoining land on an tour of the abandoned farm house. There they find that someone is lying dead in the house. Is it murder or an accident?

The Last Escape is actually E.C.R. Lorac’s last Macdonald novel, featuring him in Lunesdale visiting the farm he’s purchased ready for his retirement. He’s recruited by a local farmer to be an unimpeachable witness to something that might be construed as dodgy, and of course, in the process they discover the corpse of a man and the local farmer is attacked.

It’s not much of a puzzle, mystery-wise. Macdonald quickly figures out how the man entered the locked farmhouse, and the motives are pretty clear, as well as the fact that it’s tangled up with the escape of a prisoner that we see at the start of the book. As often with Lorac, what matters is the landscape and the characters, with Macdonald showcasing his usual humanity.

There’s a bit of an odd final chapter in which Macdonald talks about some regret/reservation about the prison system, declaring that he’s not a reformer but confiding his doubts about how prisoners are treated by warders etc. His opinions will come as no surprise to those used to his character, at least those who are attentive and have read a few of the Macdonald books (given that the detective’s opinions may not matter much to those just casually reading a classic mystery), but it feels a bit tacked on.

It doesn’t quite feel like it should be the last: Macdonald’s thinking of retiring, and definitely looking back at his career a little, but he’s not there yet. But this is where we’re left… All in all, not one of the best, but I enjoyed myself anyway.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)