Book description
At first sight the case looks simple enough to private investigator
Miles Bredon. Two cousins on a boat trip on the River Thames: Derek with
a £50,000 reason for surviving the next two months until he inherits a
legacy; Nigel with a £50,000 reason for getting rid of him and
inheriting the money himself.
When Derek disappears, Nigel naturally falls under suspicion - not
least because he has a train of alibis that is almost too perfect. But
where is the body? And if this is not murder, whose is the photograph of
a body slumped in a boat, and who left the wet footprints at the lock?
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.
