My regular trip to the Classic Mysteries vault has unearthed a real gem this week. It's a book called Hopjoy was Here, written by Colin Watson and it was the third in a series that appeared between 1952 and 1982. The dozen books in the series are known collectively as The Flaxborough Chronicles, and they are set in the far-from-bucolic-or-idyllic English town of Flaxborough, whose inhabitants seem to be possessed of a high-energy sex drive coupled with few if any moral restraints. The books are extremely funny - and, happily, some at least are turning up again in e-book versions. I recorded audio reviews of Hopjoy was Here and a couple of the other Watson books several years back. Here's what I had to say about this one. As always, it has been subjected to some minor editing along the way:
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“Never before had the inhabitants of Beatrice Avenue seen a bath carefully maneuvered through one of their front doors, carried down the path by four policemen, and hoisted into a black van.”
As opening sentences go, that’s not bad, is it? After a little more description of the scene – and of the many people watching it – the author compares it with "the wonderful, blood-chilling entertainment in Gordon Road the previous Easter when Mrs. Jackson had gone bonkers and thrown all the portable contents of the house, including a gramophone and two chamber pots, down upon some men from the council.”
What’s going on here? Well, it’s all part of the opening setup for a book called Hopjoy Was Here, first published in 1962, the third novel in Colin Watson’s Flaxborough Chronicles, a series of about a dozen mysteries set in and around the fictional English town of Flaxborough, a place described in one of the early novels as "a kind of a spirited place – like Gomorrah." Flaxborough residents, in general, appear to have few (if any) scruples about morality or behavior, particularly when it comes to sex and promiscuity.
It is the unhappy task of Detective Inspector Walter Purbright to represent the law in Flaxborough. Assisted by Detective Sergeant Sidney Love and other officers, Purbright is amiable, competent – and generally able to keep up with the crimes, petty and otherwise, that he encounters in Flaxborough.
Take the disappearance of a man named Brian Hopjoy. It is that disappearance which has caused the police to remove the entire bathtub from that house on Beatrice Street which was mentioned at the beginning. Hopjoy has vanished – as has a man named Perriam, who owns the house – and the police fear that one or the other of them has met a truly grisly fate.
Now Hopjoy was – or so he claimed – a commercial traveler, dealing in pharmaceuticals. In reality, it appears that he was something to do with the British intelligence service. Sure enough, two other representatives of that service are soon on hand, carrying out their own investigation of Hopjoy’s disappearance – for, indeed, it is Hopjoy who has vanished. The intelligence men – secret agents, to be sure - have their own views of what has happened – and those views are largely different from those of the police.
As far as the professional intelligence men are concerned, Hopjoy quite clearly must have been eliminated by an enemy agent (the enemy being rather loosely defined as somebody from the Soviet bloc of nations). Or, as one of the intelligence men puts it, Hopjoy has been “operationally negatived.” The police, on the other hand, believe that there may be a much more prosaic motive – and murder – involved here.
So what the reader is given is a really marvelous, and rather complex, series of satires – on the traditional mystery, as represented by Inspector Purbright and the rather odd citizens of Flaxborough. But there is also a great deal of fun to be had in a parody of the traditional British spy story – think James Bond and all his excesses of sexuality and other behavior. Major Ross and his intelligence colleague Major Pumphrey are marvelously semi-comic characters, and their own investigation into Hopjoy’s disappearance is so wildly different from that of the police in terms of their suspicions and their techniques that it is almost like reading two different books, as the author follows first one set of investigators and then the other.
So what really is going on here? Well the answer to that, of course, is what makes up the heart of this thoroughly enjoyable book. Both sets of investigators are in for some really surprising discoveries which will lead to both the police and the intelligence men having to re-think their conclusions rather drastically. Watson plays with his audience and with his characters, and the ending is likely to surprise most readers.
As I said earlier, Hopjoy Was Here is the third of the Flaxborough Chronicles – and I must say it’s my favorite so far out of the three Colin Watson novels I have read. Amazon lists a few copies of print editions that may be available along with an audiobook version, as well as an e-book version that should be both inexpensive and available. It's a quick read and it's very funny.
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You can listen to the original version of the audio review by clicking here.
Next: Murder on the Blackboard, by Stuart Palmer.
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