Book description
When
private investigator Miles Bredon and his wife, Angela, arrive for a
weekend at the Hallifords' country house, they find themselves part of a
singularly ill-assorted house party. Waking one morning to the news that
one among their number has been found dead by the silo, Miles has no
shortage of suspects.
The entire party had spent the previous night haring around the country
side in an 'eloping' game instigated by their hostess, and no one can
fully account for their whereabouts. The arrival of Inspector Leyland
from Scotland Yard, investigating a spate of apparent suicides of
important people, adds another dimension to the mystery, and Miles finds
himself wondering 'whether the improbable ought to be told'. It was
Ronald Knox, who, as a pioneer of Golden Age detective fiction, codified
the rules of the genre in his 'Ten Commandments of Detection', which
stipulated, among other rules, that 'No Chinaman must figure in the
story', and 'Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable'. He
was a Sherlock Holmes aficionado, writing a satirical essay that was
read by Arthur Conan Doyle himself, and is credited with creating the
notion of 'Sherlockian studies', which treats Sherlock Holmes as a
real-life character. Educated at Eton and Oxford, Knox was ordained as
priest in the Church of England but later entered the Roman Catholic
Church. He completed the first Roman Catholic translation of the Bible
into English for more than 350 years, and wrote detective stories in
order to supplement the modest stipend of his Oxford Chaplaincy.
