Book description
After Colin Reiver is acquitted of responsibility for killing a child
in a car accident he sets out on a sea cruise in the hope that it might
ease local feeling and the voice of his own conscience.
But when a few days after his departure Colin is found dead by the
roadside, Miles Bredon, investigator for the Indescribable Insurance
Company, must travel to Scotland to establish precisely when the death
occurred. The body has disappeared and reappeared in the space of
forty-eight hours and a large insurance premium is at stake. 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.
