Bruce Graeme (1900–1982)

After reading The Imperfect Crime by "Bruce Graeme" (Graham Montague Jeffries), I sat down to chase up the next book in his Stevens and Allain series---but found instead a Superintendent Stevens standalone called Epilogue which, as far as I can tell, represents the first attempt at writing an ending to Dickens' unfinished last novel, The Mystery Of Edwin Drood. To tell his story, Graeme has Superintendent William Stevens and his subordinate, Detective-Sergeant Arnold, mysteriously transported back to Victorian England---to the year 1857, when Sir Richard Mayne is the head of Scotland Yard, when the idea of the "police detective" is still in its infancy, and modern policing methods have yet to be so much as imagined. Stevens and Arnold are assigned a new case by Mayne, the disappearance of a young man named Edwin Drood, which occurred upon Christmas Eve, some eight months previously, in the cathedral town of Cloisterham... Epilogue is a very odd novel indeed, part whodunit, part history lesson, part fantasy. The latter is perhaps the least successful part of the story: simply think of the most obvious explanation you can for the police officers' experience, and you'll probably be right. However, the apparent time-travelling is merely a peg for Graeme to hang his story on. On the whole, the author does a good job reproducing Dickens' characters, and recreating the town of Cloisterham. More importantly, he plays fair both with Dickens and his own premise by following the hints laid out in The Mystery Of Edwin Drood to their natural conclusion, while holding his modern detectives to the systems and techniques of detection that would have been available to them in the mid-Victorian period (while still exercising modern detective thinking). Despite these limitations, Stevens and Arnold come to the same conclusion that, I suspect, most readers of Dickens' mystery do, and are finally able to close the book on Edwin Drood. Despite the darkness of the overarching story, a tone in keeping with Dickens' own, there is plenty of humour in Epilogue, though not all of it is successful. Superintendent Stevens, usually the most taciturn of Englishmen, finds himself quite unable to bite his tongue here, and gets himself in endless trouble via references to events that haven't yet happened and things that do not exist---and which, in the opinion of most of his auditors, never could. While some of this is exasperating (Oh, just shut up! you find yourself thinking, as Stevens bumbles through yet another recantation of something he shouldn't have said), it does culminate in a very funny courtroom scene, during which Stevens - perhaps feeling he may as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb - reveals all sorts of shocking details about the future; and while the court receives his intimations of World War I almost without flinching, it is rocked to its very foundation by Stevens' insistence that in the not-too-distant future, the world will contain such an abomination as - gasp! - women barristers...… (meer)

I really wanted to like this book, but the writing flaws defeated me. The descriptions of the Queen Mary--the building, furnishings, and what it meant to British shipbuilding--were fun and interesting. Also, he included female characters and was interested in their points of view and interests. Unfortunately, the mystery plot wandered all over, there wasn't a consistent protagonist, and the solution was less than satisfying. Also, one of the (several) subplots depended on a character going by an alias, and the real name and the alias were mixed up in the course of the book, whoops. I'm not sorry I read it, because I love a mystery on board ship, but I won't be looking for more by Graeme.… (meer)