The Viaduct Murder (1925) by Ronald A. Knox

Among mystery fans, Ronald A. Knox is best known for A. his Ten Commandments of detective fiction or B. the visual novel Umineko no naku koro ni, where his daughter attacks people with those commandments. But his actual mystery fiction has fallen by the wayside. I’ve read a handful of his short stuff and mostly enjoyed it (“Solved by Inspection” being the highlight), but I was interested in checking out his novels. And so, I turned to his first book, The Viaduct Murder.

The book is set in a small village, a lovely, picturesque town known for it’s golf scene, specifically the distinguished club of Paston Oatvile. We open with four friends currently engaged in such a game: Alexander Gordon, an undistinguished and quite conventional Britishman. Marryatt, a clergyman. Carmichal, a long-winded don. And Mordaunt Reeves, a former member of British Intelligence who had been engaged in hush-hush work during the war (he ineffectually reported minor acts of protest). Reeves’s ball goes wide during a game, and during the hunt for it, he and Gordon stumble across a body lying near one of the pillars of the viaduct (a train bridge with columns). The face has been battered almost beyond recognition, but some evidence on the body indicates that it’s Brotherhood, a club member who’s just gone bankrupt and is infamous for his lectures on atheism on the lawn.

It looks like a suicide, but some evidence—two watches, one an hour faster than the other, a cipher, the photograph of an unknown woman, and a golf ball on the bridge—points the foursome in a more serious direction: Murder. And so the four of them—some with more enthusiasm than the others—set out to investigate.

This book is hilarious. Just about every line has some form of witty aside from Knox. See the beginning of the book, where he extols the beauty and history of Paston Oatvile and the surrounding village, only to admit that all of this is seen by the club members through the lens of golf games. It’s very breezy and not at all mean-spirited. The ending of chapter 22 and the revelations in chapter 23 are the highlights. This book is very much in the “Murder, what fun!” school. The mystery aspect is good too. Knox doesn’t give us a super complex mystery, but a seemingly straightforward scenario that he gradually adds more wrinkles too. It keeps the novel moving at a pretty good pace, as there’s always some minor complication or mystery to solve. Befitting the author, there are a couple of false solutions that could easily have been the basis for an actual mystery. They are both fairly clued and have problems that the reader can see before they’re spelled out.

Knox actually takes a few pokes at overly complex mystery novels along the way. Our group is fun to follow, but it’s clear that most of them are a bit too full of themselves to make good detectives. This all builds up to an ending that could have been a massive anti-climax if Knox didn’t handle it so smoothly. The penultimate chapter where Knox spells out the theme of the novel made me feel that I’d been tricked into reading a Chesterton novel, but I think Knox earned it. The book does suffer from the same problem that a lot of these “You know, this amateur detective stuff sure is silly, innt?” stories have where the false solution is more interesting and alluring than the rather mundane truth. I know, that’s the point.

In the end, I really liked this book, much more than I expected to. I thought I was in for a dull slog, but instead got a lively, entertaining romp that both celebrates and pokes fun at the classic detective story. I’m genuinely excited to read more of Knox. After all, you can’t pull the rug out from the genre like this without loving it on some level. And his false solutions show that he knows how to construct a good mystery. Recommended.

This book is out of copyright can be found on Standard Ebooks here.

 Other reviews: Mysteries Ahoy, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel,