- By Zoë Johnson
- First published: UK: Geoffrey Bles, 1937
- Availability: Moonstone Press
Fourth review of the day.
“A Golden Age detective novel with an offbeat sense of humour and a cast of colourful characters,” according to the blurb. But I have seldom read quite so unprepossessing a detective story. (For an altogether more enthusiastic review, see Pretty Sinister Books.)
The locale is a Devon fishing village. The vicar, Pratt, receives an anonymous letter; is shadowed by (the villagers presume) a detective; and flees. He is found at the foot of a cliff, shot through the heart: apparently killed by a wooden-legged man. A few days later, a severed head floats down the river (as one will 40 years later in Edmund Crispin’s Glimpses of the Moon). And the local squire is persecuted with rotten fish and metronomes.
I fail to find much humour or colour in this; what little humour there is, is of an unrelentingly sardonic and would-be Swiftian kind, while there is a complete dearth of attractive characters; all are disagreeable, and probably diseased and dirty to boot. Behold:
Chapter 1
- His eye, his watery eye, took on an expression of, at once, great surprise and indignation;
- With a sharp click of her false teeth, Mrs. Busby the butcher’s wife shut her mouth…
- Under the schoolmistress’s inexpert, podgy fingers the ancient organ gave its preliminary cough and set about wheezing the final hymn.
- The handful of glum worshippers, uncomfortable in their Sunday starch and polish, shuffled out with whispering and creaking into the bleak September drizzle.
- The little vestry of Holy Trinity was ill-lit and cold and damp, and it reeked of the carbolic soap which Mrs. Fitzroy lavished on its bare boards.
- But the Rev. Pratt maintained an ungracious silence all the way down the hill and seemed to find solace only in squinting down the long length of his rheumy nose.
- He always performed his visiting-duties perfunctorily and unsympathetically…
- For a moment, Pratt sank back on his chair without saying anything, his watery eyes dilating and his thin, knobbly throat giving out pitiful clucking sounds.
- Had he not suffered from heartburn, brought on, as any Harley Street man could have told him, by his inveterate habit of bolting his food and drinking too much stewed tea…
- On principle, Dr. Girdwood from Corfield detested all clergymen – and all his life he had detested the Vicar of Larcombe more than most. When, therefore, he arrived on the scene and knelt down to turn the corpse over on to its back, his first feeling was not, as it usually was in such cases, one of melancholy disgust at the essential ugliness of every form of death, but rather of sardonic relish. He had hated Pratt. Pratt had died. Pratt had died an unpleasant death. Good. Dr. Girdwood was like that. He was a hard, childish man.
- This famous martinet. [The Inspector]
- The sour little doctor.
- And he did not wash over-much. Blutton regarded the man with ill favour. Blutton hated dirt – and there was no denying that his face and beard and hands and finger-nails and clothes were dirty. He loved orderliness and decency – and there was no denying that the shop was insanitary, with its poky, cobwebbed window, its strange smell composed of numberless dusty, decaying ingredients ranging from acid drops to old tarred rope, and its fantastic jumble of junk. Looking at his own boots to avoid seeing the stains of nicotine and food on Hannabus’s moustache and beard…
- Blutton stuffed his mouth; then when his teeth were free from the sickly muck…
- Blutton turned and slunk out of the room, questing for some subordinate upon whom to vent his bile.
Chapter 2
- Det.-Sergt. Plumper had just finished growing a moustache – and he was very proud of it. He loved to stroke and smooth and twiddle the ends of it; long, silky and black they were, like a mandarin’s. This habit of his infuriated Blutton. When you spoke to the man, he would lean his chin on his hand, run his first finger and thumb down and up, down and up the left side of his growth, leer at you, positively leer at you with his little pig-eyes and say hardly anything but “Ah” and “Um.”
- The latter’s office – a room that was as cheerful as a Workhouse, as spotless as an Isolation Ward and as chill as a Police-woman.
- When Plumper had left Paddington that morning, it had been raining hard, the air had been harshly cold and the station had smelt more than ever of decomposed cabbage and leaky gasometers. But on the Setterham cliff-road the sun was beaming as Jipps drove him down to Larcombe. The sea was as quiet as a child and remarkably blue, the air was soft, seagulls were wheeling and screaming, the cliffs were red and brown and benevolent, and smooth fields sloped away from their tops. Plumper was not impressed by what he saw; in any case, he had seen it so often before on railway posters.
- At this moment he did not look quite so pretty; he was collarless and the folds of his neck hung down like dewlaps, his eyes were sticky with sleep, his oily hair was rumpled and hanging about his head in rats’-tails, his cheeks were pasty and not so much ruddy as grey.
- Jack consulted a pamphlet: “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Tivoli – ‘Stained Saints.’ Electric Kinema, ‘Sex Unmasked – Adults Only.’
- Peascod, with his own skilful hands, had built a dinner round a cock-a-leekie: a fine dinner. Indeed, cookery seemed to be the only real talent of this pensioned-off, gently-lunatic product of a much-divorced mother and a much-bankrupt father. Gently-lunatic but not corybantic or daft; his mania was self-expression – and he had a truly embarrassing enthusiasm for all forms of painting, music, the written and spoken word and alcohol, though he could neither paint well, sing or play well, write well, speak well or drink deep. But for some strange reason, he could cook well.
- The entrance to the drive that led to Old Barton was about fifty yards higher up the hill than the Vicarage. As the two policemen walked down this drive, the sun was shining and the air was sharp, but there was not the exhilaration about the place that should come from sharp air and morning sun. The woods bordering the drive had been allowed to run wild; there was much rot, much dankness and the shadows cast by the trees were cold. At Old Barton itself there were many cracked and broken windows. But it was not a sinister or mysterious house, it was just big, ugly, dirty and in a dreadful state of disrepair. It was a Victorian monstrosity – too tough ever to run to seed and too tough ever to borrow any graces from Time. Empty milk-bottles lay about the rococo porch and a teeming dustbin stood a few yards away.
- The air in the room was stale and as foul as the floor; there were cigarette-ends and cigarette ashes everywhere; old stains, dirty glasses, empty bottles of whiskey, crumbs and scraps of old food, holes in the carpet, dust, a pack of cards and a cribbage board, a new shotgun standing in a corner.
- His nose was very big and very red; unnaturally big and unnaturally red; it was diseased. His hand shook so much that he could only with difficulty raise his glass to his lips without spilling the whiskey.
- Blutton was anxious to go. The atmosphere of the room was sickening him and Gedling’s nose was an abomination.
- “Well?” replied Plumper with his customary leer.
- Plumper twiddled his moustache and seemed to sneer.
Chapter 3
- The more Plumper reflected on Jeremiah Scoutey the vaguer grew his eye, which had hitherto been engaged in a dispirited survey of the flamboyant, hugely-fragrant Jewess sitting opposite him. By the time the train ran into Newton Abbot he was hardly conscious that she was there at all.
- Yeo unlocked the door. He stood as if to prevent the detective from entering, but the latter pushed past him unceremoniously. The innkeeper looked very ill and distraught. He had neither shaved nor washed for three days, and he was collarless. His great rolls of fat seemed to have retreated, leaving his flesh pouched and baggy. He was no longer fat in the merry, tight way; especially when he sat down, you got the impression that one day soon his belly would sag down as far as his knees. It was difficult to hear what he said because he kept his mouth loosely open so that flakes of froth accumulated on his lower protruding lip. His left eye had a slight cast. He was breathing noisily and supporting himself with his hands tightly clenched on the back of a chair.
Chapter 4
- By the time Blutton had digested his high tea of boiled cod and cold marmalade pudding and taken off his big black boots, he was enjoying a sweeter humour than he had experienced for several days. In the beginning, Plumper’s prestige had somewhat intimidated him and this intimidation, coupled with a real dislike of the man, had worked on the Inspector’s bile. The dislike was natural enough. Plumper was a younger man. Plumper cultivated an aloof, disconcerting, at times churlish manner. Plumper had no gift for co-operation. Plumper was not self-consciously, rigidly a policeman. Plumper was not a teetotaller or a Nonconformist. But Blutton was so accustomed to being on an unsympathetic footing with his colleagues – for twenty-one years he had looked for nothing but unthinking, mechanical obedience from his inferiors and cold politeness from his superiors – that his dislike for Plumper was, in itself, no bar to a good relationship. But the intimidation was a different matter. It had hampered him, put him out of his stride. However, the feeling that he owed the Scotland Yard man an almost obligatory respect – not respect for rank but for reputation, achievement – had now disappeared and the Inspector could now and again find time to smile in his little heart if not on his big face. Plumper was not up to standard. He was making no progress, or rather, progress in the wrong direction. He was bigotedly running a fanciful theory for the simple and regrettable reason that he, Blutton, had got his teeth into something else, something solid!
- Letting a pip fall from her mouth into a saucer which she always had by her when eating her evening orange.
- Back in the Orchard at Larcombe, Alan Charnock was sleeping badly and it was not the snoring of his wife that was keeping him awake. She had snored ever since she had had her false teeth fitted and he was as accustomed to it as he was to the rumble of the breaking sea.
It’s as foul as “The Lady’s Dressing Room”.
There is less of this in the final third of the novel; Johnson seems to have gotten something out of her system, no doubt by purgative or emetic means. Which leaves us with the detective story. And very unremarkable that is.
There is nothing clever about the revelation of X’s guilt; it might as well be him as anyone else. The police fail to catch the crook, who kidnaps the inspector, confesses at great length, then hangs himself. The plot is the timeworn motif of the avenger from the past (one of my least favourite devices), with a nod to John Rhode’s Murders in Praed Street (ROT13 gur ureonyvfg). The novelty, such as it is, is that the avenger does not execute his carefully elaborated scheme of 20 years; three of his intended victims destroy themselves, and a fourth is killed by his agent. There are few if any clues, and the reader has no earthly chance of deducing the existence of the drug-trafficking gang, the Scrivens’ involvement, Frank Dodson, or what happened to Ridd.
The reader who wants “a Golden Age detective novel with an offbeat sense of humour and a cast of colourful characters” should read Gladys Mitchell or Michael Innes instead.
Contemporary reviews
The Daily Telegraph (Charles Williams, 15th October 1937): Miss Zoë Johnson brings us to a coast village At the Sign of the Clove and Hoof, and a series of deaths beginning with the Vicar, including a pretty piece of macabre work, curving out to kill a local misanthrope and the innkeeper, and coming to an end as inevitable as the stairs when the lift has stopped. Miss Johnson has followed Holmes; she has eliminated all possible solutions but one, and that one most improbable. Also she has a slight tendency to overdo her characters; there is a young eccentric named Peascod who from a blessing begins to be a bore. These are accidents. Miss Johnson has the root of the matter – economy, intelligence, wit, invention, and (a good flower from such a root) a nasty trick with her corpses.
The Observer (Torquemada, 24th October 1937): As Zoë Johnson collects us all At the Sign of the Clove and Hoof, that centre of village deaths, she proves herself a hostess at once sophisticated and simple. But I must admit that while the sophistication is real enough, the simplicity may be put on by cunning. This duplicity, however created, shows itself in a major way in the criminal structure of the tale, and in a minor way in the fashionable ribaldry which the author allows herself. A song sung at the pub (though it differs from my version by the substitution of Derby for Derbyshire) is as full of conscious licence as anyone would be likely to wish, but the calling throughout of a character by a colloquialism which would be frowned on in the most chromium of drawing-rooms seems to me either pointless or unwitting. One thing at least must be said. Zoë Johnson does something quite new in making all her detectives inept and thus requiring the murderer to apprehend and hang himself. He was my firm guess, but only a guess. Young Peascod, the amateur, could be more amusing; but he does fetch smiles from us, and that which befell him and the pleasant barmaid on an afternoon outing is finely grim. In fact, At the Sign of the Clove and Hoof almost absorbed me, and when the author opens another hostelry I shall be there.
The Liverpool Daily Post (29th December 1937): Miss Zoë Johnson’s At the Sign of the Clove and Hoof is a very entertaining first detective novel with a host of murders, a most unconventional detective, some effective and well-chosen characters and good-humoured writing. The fault of the book lies in its somewhat ineffective, although quite surprising, conclusion, but Miss Johnson is obviously a writer to watch.
The Grandest Game in the World 