Like so many other residential hotels in Kensington, the Garden Hotel was an uninspiring arrangement of stucco, tiled doorsteps, aspidistras, revolving doors, verandahs and hall porter.
"It looks neither odd nor comfortable," reflected Venables, negotiating the steps, the hall porter, the doors and the aspidistra...
Well, Charles Venables is likely to be proven only half correct in his initial assessment of the Garden Hotel. He is correct in assuming that the hotel is unlikely to prove very comfortable. But it most certainly is odd, at the very least, as are many of the rather eccentric residents. And the occurrences of a disappearance from and a murder within a locked room in the hotel surely must be considered as odd. Also, as Charles has discovered, the price paid by its guests was distinctly too low. The details will be found in an English Golden Age mystery that appears to be available, at the moment, under two different titles: as a paperback book, it is called Pass the Body, which was its American title, while as an e-book it is known by the title, Crime in Kensington, by which it was originally published in the U.K. in 1933. It was the first mystery to be written by Christopher St. John Sprigg (who wrote as "Christopher Caudwell"). It is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you may listen to the complete review by clicking here.
Charles Venables, now earning a (somewhat) precarious living as a gossip columnist for the Daily Mercury, finds himself on the scene for the very unfortunate goings-on at the Garden Hotel. His friend, Lady Viola Merritt, daughter of the Earl of Buxley, was already a resident of the Garden Hotel and had suggested that Charles move in to the hotel, because of the low price and the surprisingly high quality of the amenities. Even on the day of his arrival, Charles found the hotel a bit unusual, to say the least. As he reflected:
"This is really too awful...When one hears a bloke threaten to kill his wife and then immediately afterwards meets a sinister and mysterious Oriental, it is time to move somewhere else, for one has obviously walked into the plot of a thriller of the vulgarest and most exciting description."
And that night, Mrs. Budge, who owns the Garden Hotel along with her husband, disappears from her bedroom (and another older resident is attacked in that same room as well) – and yet nobody could have entered or left the room unobserved. It won’t be long before a particularly gruesome discovery brings Scotland Yard – in the person of Detective Inspector Bernard Bray – into the case. Inspector Bray will find an ally in Charles Venables – who has some useful skills in his own background that will be helpful to both of them in solving a shocking murder case – and, with it, uncovering the secrets of the Garden Hotel.
In his brief lifetime, Christopher St. John Sprigg wrote only seven mystery novels – before he went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War, where he died in battle. Pass the Body was the first of his crime books, and it reinforces my enjoyment of, and respect for, Sprigg’s plotting skill and extremely witty writing. It is available as a paperback under the title Pass the Body or as an e-book entitled Crime in Kensington. If you enjoy impossible crimes, interesting characters, and clever writing, you will enjoy this book.
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