Murder in the Maze

by J.J. Connington

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 240
Rating:

Synopsis:

When twin brothers Roger and Neville Shandon are murdered by poisoned darts in Whistlefield's famous hedge maze, Sir Clinton Driffield arrives to restore order. He finds two terrified witnesses - visitors to the estate - and clues aplenty in this brilliantly conceived and meticulously realized country-house mystery.

J.J. Connington’s Murder in the Maze is the second book I’ve read by him, if I recall correctly, and I admit I’d expected slightly better from what I remembered of The Ha-Ha Case — though admittedly that was a later book. This is the first one featuring Sir Clinton Driffield, and it suffered from both culprit and detective being incredibly obvious.

There are a few efforts at misdirection that just don’t come off because they’re incredibly obvious. I think the story does try to lampshade this a bit by the “Watson” character realising what Driffield’s up to belatedly, but… the reader understood chapters and chapters ago, and much of what’s coming up is obvious too. I could almost predict every step, from the fake attacks to a side character’s romantic feelings, and it was clumsy as well that several characters (like the two who find the bodies at the start, along with the man they find in the maze) simply slip out of sight.

The whole thing isn’t particularly ingenious, in part because it relies on ye olde exotic poisons (curare, in this case), which immediately narrows the field due to access. It’s never pointed out that, for example, it rules out a particular character — but where would he have got curare from?

I don’t want to spoiler people who might be interested, so I won’t go into too many specifics — suffice it to say, I was disappointed with the quality of this one, and it wore out its welcome pretty quickly. Besides that, the dramatic denouement is then somewhat spoiled by a lengthy debriefing (detective speaks to the various former suspects to explain everything) and by the detective taking justice into his own hands because he knows best, a bugbear of mine in these stories.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)