The Middle Temple Murder. Nigel Moss

years Fletcher worked for various regional newspapers, including the Leeds Mercury (writing rustic pieces under the pseudonym ‘Son of the Soil’) and the Yorkshire Post. Fletcher married in his early-20s, but this was to end in separation. His second marriage was to Irish novelist Rosamond Langbridge, noted for her psychological study of Charlotte Brontë, and they lived in the home counties until his death.

      In his late-20s, while still working in journalism, Fletcher’s wide-ranging and prolific writing career took off, encompassing poetry, biography, history and historical fiction, topography, country life, cricket, religion and detective fiction, extending for over 40 years, and resulting in some 237 books—almost half were mysteries—a true literary behemoth. Fletcher’s first fictional work was a historical romance, When Charles I was King (1892), one of the last Victorian three-decker novels. He published collections of journalistic pieces about the Yorkshire countryside, and novels of rural life after the style of Richard Jefferies. Fletcher’s regional dialect writings earned him the soubriquet ‘the Yorkshire Hardy’. His historical reference works about Yorkshire were admired and respected, especially the three-volume A Picturesque History of Yorkshire (1900), and he was made a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

      In the early-1900s, Fletcher gave up journalism to devote himself to writing books, including his first crime novels. This was a time of buoyant public demand for mystery stories, a lucrative pastime for authors. The Sherlock Holmes stories of Conan Doyle were especially popular. Fletcher’s early crime fiction was a mix of orthodox mystery novels and short stories, as well as thriller ‘shockers’ similar to those of Edgar Wallace and Sax Rohmer. His best-known mystery story collection featured an elderly Yorkshire amateur detective, The Adventures of Archer Dawe, Sleuth-Hound (1909), followed later by stories of private investigator Paul Campenhaye, Specialist in Criminology (1918). By the end of WWI, Fletcher had gained a reputation as a moderately successful, talented author, writing in different genres on a wide range of subjects.

      The Middle Temple Murder (1919) was to prove a breakthrough for Fletcher. It begins, in arresting fashion, with Frank Spargo, a young sub-editor on the Watchman newspaper, walking home from Fleet Street in the early hours of a June morning in 1912. He happens upon the discovery of the body of an elderly man who has been found bludgeoned to death, lying in the entrance to barristers’ chambers on Middle Temple Lane, a narrow thoroughfare running between Fleet Street and the Embankment. There are no means of identification on the body; the victim’s pockets are empty, save for a scrap of paper bearing the name and address of Ronald Breton, a young barrister. Spargo senses a potential journalistic scoop. He gains the trust of Detective-Sergeant Rathbury of Scotland Yard, and accompanies him during initial enquiries. Subsequently they agree to exchange and share information, while pursuing their investigations independently. Spargo adopts the novel approach of publishing his findings in the Watchman and inviting the public to come forward with information. This strategy proves successful—as well as advancing the paper’s circulation. The narrative focuses on Spargo’s unravelling of the mystery—who the murdered person was, why he was murdered, and who did it. Breton assists him in the background.

      The book succeeds on many different levels. Spargo is personable and likeable, a refreshingly principled journalist. Although wholly inexperienced at sleuthing, he displays enthusiasm, determination and wisdom. Along with E.C Bentley’s earlier fictional creation Philip Trent, Spargo was one of the first journalist-detectives, later to prove popular with American and British crime writers. The story is mainly set in urban London, around Fleet Street, the Temple and Waterloo, areas with which Fletcher was familiar. There are occasional excursions—to Market Milcaster, a decaying, genteel West Country market town, and at the conclusion to the northern Fell country. The atmosphere of each location is vividly and evocatively conveyed, enhancing the storytelling.

      The plot is well constructed, complex and entertaining. The diverse storyline threads and multi-dimensional sub-plots are akin to the pieces of a complicated jigsaw puzzle; eventually slotting together to form a pleasing symmetry and reveal an intricate and intriguing mystery. Colourful new minor characters are introduced at different stages, and fresh clues regularly emerge during the investigation to set the story off in a new direction, in the vein of a pursuit thriller; these help to hold the reader’s interest throughout. The pace is quicker than in many other detective stories of the period, with plenty of plot twists, red herrings and historic crimes subordinate to the murder which reveal a motive deep in the past. Fletcher doesn’t leave loose ends. With a tightly plotted, swiftly moving and suspenseful storyline, he manages to keep the murderer’s identity hidden until the penultimate page. Fletcher’s journalistic skills show in the short chapter structure, multi-layered plots and page-turning, cliffhanger style of writing, typical of series publications. The book is well written but unpretentious; it has a surprisingly modern feel, brisk and light, and still holds up well today.

      One of the sub-plots is developed from the short story ‘The Contents of the Coffin’, which appeared in Fletcher’s earlier collection The Adventures of Archer Dawe, Sleuth-Hound. That story is helpfully included in this new edition; it offers an interesting comparison.

      The success which followed the publication of The Middle Temple Murder in August 1919 transformed Fletcher’s writing career. At the end of WWI Fletcher was in his mid-fifties, and thereafter until his death in 1935 he predominantly wrote detective fiction, prodigiously averaging three mystery novels annually. The Middle Temple Murder was Fletcher’s first detective novel to be published in America. It went through six printings during the first year and together with Woodrow Wilson’s widely-publicised encomium quickly established Fletcher’s reputation in the US. The New York Times Book Review in August 1920 hailed Fletcher as a ‘new’ author of detective fiction that was ‘ingenious, complicated and much better written than the average’. Fletcher was dubbed ‘the Dean of Mystery Writers’. One leading American critic wrote of his ‘concocting detective stories that hold the reader absolutely breathless’; and another ‘I simply live from Fletcher to Fletcher’. The traditional Englishness and vibrantly described settings (usually in London and Yorkshire), as well as refined style of Fletcher’s mysteries, were particularly appealing to Anglophile readers. During the 1920s, more than 40 Fletcher mystery novels and short story collections appeared in the US, including reprints of earlier works published in the UK. Those who enjoy The Middle Temple Murder are recommended to The Charing Cross Mystery (1923), a comparable example of his best mystery writing.

      In the late-1920s critics began referring to the ‘Fletcher Factory’ or ‘Fletcher Mill’ to describe his prodigious, almost business-like output. His reliable and entertaining novels became a mainstay of public libraries and high-street shops. But the sheer speed of writing and over-production inevitably meant fluctuation in quality. By the mid-1930s Fletcher’s popularity had started to wane. The Golden Age was in full flow in England and had brought in a fresher, more modern style of detection writing; and in America darker ‘hard-boiled’ mystery stories were in vogue, reflecting the recent economic depression. However, Franklin D. Roosevelt kept up the US presidential Fletcher-reading tradition, with several Fletcher detective novels among his summer vacation books in 1934. Fletcher died in January 1935 at his home in Dorking, just short of age 72; his writing career had spanned five decades.

      Since his death, Fletcher’s works have largely been out of print and neglected, except for The Middle Temple Murder. There are several evident contributing factors for this decline. Firstly, the older style of Fletcher’s mystery writing: he was from an earlier generation than most Golden Age authors, a contemporary of Conan Doyle. Many of Fletcher’s crime novels pre-date the Golden Age and are mystery adventures and thrillers typical of the Holmesian era; even those written within it are of a very different style. There is no closed form of detection and fair play clueing, and his plots lack the sophisticated puzzles and emphasis on deduction contained in the works of Christie and other Golden Age leading practitioners. Dorothy L. Sayers wrote in 1933, ‘Mr Fletcher does not write detective stories in the modern sense of the phrase,’ rather that he appealed to those readers ‘who like being puzzled, but do not want to sit down to a mystery story as though it were an examination paper.’ As he wrote in various genres, Fletcher chose mostly not to stick with one hero or detective in a series, save for the early Archer