Contrived Coincidence: The mere fact that the party ends up in Valley House while the mystery there plays out would be enough, but that all of this should happen on the 20th anniversary of John Strange’s murder just blows everything past all probability. J. Jefferson Farjeon does provide a subtly humorous, well-plotted, if not strictly cozy, puzzle for us to solve. As the conditions outside are worsening, to leave seems out of the question, so the party decides to make use of the food and shelter and offer to pay the mysterious owner whenever he or she turns up. Strange and his daughter reveal that the actual mystery is something completely unexpected and nothing really to do with all that came before.

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You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Heading up the investigation is Acting DS Rob Minshull, but he's out of his depth in an investigation full of dead ends.

Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages.Attempts are made at trying to find a path out of the snowbound haven but these fail but on one of the excursions a lady and her father are discovered, having crashed their car into a ditch. A murder turns out to have taken place on the train, and later another body is discovered in the snow. I was thinking, as I read, what a wonderful movie this would make, casting a young Joanna Lumley as Laura, produced by the BBC or whosoever makes the Agatha Christie series. If you’re looking for a book to read when snowed in somewhere remote then this is either the perfect read, or will produce sleepless nights.

Farjeon, while perhaps not up to Dame Agatha Christie’s standard or that of Gladys Mitchell, can hold his own with Patricia Wentworth (also too much neglected), Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, John Bude, Anthony Berkeley, and Miss Sayers herself. They wonder if they’ve made a rash decision, one that may lead to their demise miraculously when they come upon a house, ring the bell and when receiving no answer find the door unlocked, no one home but a fire is burning. This approach also raised personal expectations for the book as a whole, and these fell a little short by the end, when such early-chapter promises of tone and setting were never quite realized. What’s enticing is the of The British Library to publish new editions of the series for contemporary enjoyment.

He also wrote the screenplay for Michael Powell's My Friend the King (1932) and provided the story for Bernard Vorhaus's The Ghost Camera (1933). I can greatly appreciate a mischievous approach to structure that allows the police to appear only in the penultimate chapter, as Farjeon uses here. One critic for the Saturday Review of Literature reviewed one of his later books writing that it was "amusing, satirical, and [a] frequently hair-raising yarn of an author who got dangerously mixed up with his imaginary characters. The reason for this is that oft times when the goings on in the plot are very much a mystery to the reader!