The name of the insurance company was "The Indescribable Insurance Company." The insurance policy of which they were quite justifiably proud was something called "the Euthanasia policy," which was a most generous policy indeed. If the policy holder who bought the Euthanasia policy, and paid its remarkably high premiums, were to die before his 65th birthday, the company would pay a very generous sum to the dead man's heirs. If he survived until after that birthday, then the policy holder himself would begin receiving a generous annuity for the rest of his life. There was only one way that fortunate policy holder could lose and that was by committing suicide, for the Indescribable Company would not pay a suicide or his heirs.
All of which explains why the death of a man named Jephthah Mottram set off something of a scramble to determine whether he had killed himself (by turning on the gas at the tap in the hotel bedroom where he died, the room being securely locked on the inside) or had killed himself (in which case, why were all the gas taps found to be turned off when they broke into the dead man's room?) The Indescribable Insurance Company sent its top investigator, Miles Bredon to try to figure out whether Mottram was a suicide or a murder victim - and whether the company should pay Mottram's heirs or refuse any payment at all. That's the mystery at the heart of an excellent Golden Age mystery by Ronald A. Knox called The Three Taps, first published in 1927. It's the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you are welcome to listen to the complete review by clicking here. In June, The Merion Press, a small American publisher, brought Ronald A. Knox’s Golden Age mystery The Three Taps back into print, and the publisher has sent me a copy for this review.
Ronald Knox was one of the most prominent British detective story authors in the early years of the Golden Age. He was an English cleric, having been ordained in the English church in 1911 and then converted to Roman Catholicism in 1917. Most of his mysteries featured, as their series detective, Miles Bredon, first introduced in The Three Taps. Father Knox is also remembered for the guidelines he published for mystery authors, a document Knox called his Ten Commandments for detective fiction. He was also one of the founders of Britain’s prestigious Detection Club. As a mystery author, Knox was a firm believer in the concept of “fair play.” He called for authors to give readers the clues they would need to determine the correct solution to a given mystery – clues that, quite naturally, would be well hidden by clever misdirection. Readers will find that in The Three Taps. For fans who enjoy Golden Age plotting in their mysteries, The Three Taps deserves a place on your reading lists.
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