First things first, the writing style. If you like your sentences uncomplicated and unadorned (or your murder investigations taken seriously), this may not be the book for you. Fortunately, I loved it. Here’s the opening of the book. Reading this, I knew I was going to enjoy myself with this one:

“Scholarship asks, thank God, no recompense but Truth. It is not for the sake of material reward that she (Scholarship) pursues her (Truth) through the undergrowth of Ignorance, shining on Obscurity the bright torch of Reason and clearing aside the tangled thorns of Error with the keen secateurs of Intellect. Nor is it for the sake of public glory and the applause of the multitude: the scholar is indifferent to vulgar acclaim. Nor is it even in the hope that those few intimate friends who have observed at first hand the labour of the chase will mark with a word or two of discerning congratulation its eventual achievement. Which is very fortunate, because they don’t.”

It’s not all this dense, but just so you know what you’re letting yourself in for…

The letter-diary format gives the book an unusual dual-narrative. Julia’s letters read like an impossibly erudite holiday romance/farce as she pursues her attractive fellow traveller Ned, all while blundering into misunderstandings and fending off less desirable admirers. The parts back in London involve the bantering barristers theorizing about the murder, and eventually, once the other suspects return home, actually investigating it.
The drip-feed of Julia’s letters also works as an excellent pacing device, since they provide a natural way of delivering a surprising twist – the fact that we know that the farce ends in murder lends tension and irony to her light and frothy narrative. The lawyers are highly active readers, willing to theorize with incomplete data, speculate about Julia’s state of mind, and provide context (usually about how incompetent Julia is at everything except tax lawyering).

The letters also contain something really important – all the clues! This book is a masterly demonstration in how to hide clues in amongst jokes and scene setting. The clues for the main murder are more obvious, but there’s also a much more tricky subplot involving another crime which might have the best clue in the book.
Though note that I said all the clues. Hilary actually states after the final letter is received that they had all the clues they needed. So all the investigations the gang do are mostly to confirm Hilary’s hypotheses. Regardless, they are still fun to read, especially for the sneaky ways that the team use to worm facts out of the suspects.

In fact there’s another narrative layer on top of the letters, since narrator-detective Hilary is happy to drop the odd bit of foreshadowing into their narrative – for example, telling the reader in the opening paragraphs that Julia will be suspected of a murder before the characters even learn of it, or even, Carr-style, ruling out a possible theory only moments after you’ve thought of it. In a way this is necessary, otherwise the reader might wonder for the first chapter what the holiday sex farce (with Greek chorus) was doing in the Crime Fiction section. But Caudwell makes the most of this delicious extra narrative layer, especially since Hilary is not entirely self-aware of their foibles. Unlike with Julia’s letters, it’s left to the reader to spot these little jokes.

However, all of this unusual – but fun – structure does come with a downside, which is that the characters we spend the most time with are Julia and the lawyers back home, rather than the actual suspects. This serves the comedy aspect quite well, since the lawyers deliver a steady flow of quips and character-based humour (they would make good sitcom characters). But thanks to this, most of the suspects are very flimsy and get little depth beyond the initial character portraits given by Julia. It can be hard to get invested in guessing whodunnit, though the lawyers themselves pick up the slack with their wild theories.

That said, as the book approaches the ending, it begins to take on a more sombre tone, and the eventual reveal was both tense and affecting. Caudwell’s ability to swiftly bring in poignancy and character depth really impressed me. For all the fun and games throughout the earlier parts of the novel – and indeed the post-reveal part too – the solution was not just a throw-away that pinned the murder on a random suspect. From a plotting point of view I was also impressed, as Caudwell managed to fool me with a plot tricky enough to match the Golden Age of Detection. Admittedly it’s also about as implausible as some of those too. I absolutely was kicking myself afterwards – I should have figured it out!

The main strength of the book, though, is really its humour. It’s packed full of witty lines, absurd situations, and eccentric characters, and the book was a joy to read from start to finish. Though it’s perhaps not one to binge-read, as I found the characters threatened to become annoying rather than amusing after a too-long reading session. Still, for plot and wit, this comes absolutely recommended.

Other opinions:

Clothes in Books
Desperate Reader
Fiction Fan Blog
Mysteries Ahoy
Mystery File