Christopher Bush wrote 63 mysteries featuring the gifted polymath and amateur sleuth Ludovic Travers and his Scotland Yard friend, colleague and {occasional} sparring partner Superintendent George Wharton. The U.K. publisher Dean Street Press is in the midst of a project to publish or re-publish all of those books. That’s particularly welcome, since I believe relatively few of these Golden Age Classics were ever published in the United States before now. That’s a pity. When Bush is good – and he usually is – he can be very good indeed. Consider, for example, The Case of the Leaning Man, a tantalizing puzzle of a mystery written by Bush in 1938. That book is the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast. You're welcome to listen to the complete review by clicking here.
It begins as three separate problems for Ludo Travers. One involves the murder of a maharajah in his hotel suite. Mix in the story of an unknown man found leaning against a London shop window as he was dying of atropine poisoning. And you’ll need to know at least some of the facts behind a bitter – and VERY private – family feud which threatened to tear a theatrical family apart. All three of those events came to the attention of Ludovic Travers at roughly the same time, but it took even Ludo some time to figure out the who, why and how of it.
The Case of the Leaning Man begins with the trouble facing the theatrical professionals of the Haire family – that grand old-school actor, Sir Jerome Haire, and his two daughters, the dancer Bernice Haire and her younger sister Joy. Joy and Bernice had just returned from a triumphant Australasian tour together, and were expected to leave London immediately for a tour of the United States and Canada. And then, very suddenly, plans changed. The two sisters, it appeared, were no longer on speaking terms – to the consternation of their friends (not to mention their agent). What had gone wrong – and could it be fixed?
Ludo Travers was trying to make sense of that feud when he became involved in the investigation of two mysterious deaths. The first incident happened while Travers was walking home. He noticed a man leaning up against a shop window, obviously unwell. Ludo helped police load the unknown man into an ambulance, but he died at the hospital. And shortly thereafter, Ludo Travers was called into the case of that Indian maharajah apparently stabbed to death in his London hotel room.
Three separate cases to be solved? Not really, for it quickly became apparent that the murders – and the feuding Haire family – were all somehow connected. And it would be up to Ludo – as a friend of the Haires but also in his role as a consultant for Scotland Yard – to try to find a solution to a remarkably sticky problem.
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