Book description
In a gas-lit inn in the countryside a man lies dead. The police, of
course, investigate - and so do Miles Bredon and his wife, in the
interests of the Indescribable Insurance Company, with which the
deceased man, Mr Mottram, had been heavily insured.
The culprit is the three gas taps in Mr Mottram's room, and Miles hopes
to prove that his death is suicide. Miles' old wartime colleague, Police
Inspector Leyland, is convinced it's murder. And the conclusion is as
ingenious as it is surprising. 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.
