Book ReviewsBritish authorsCrime and thrillers

The Cheltenham Square Murder by John Bude [review]

Cheltenham Square MurderThe town of Cheltenham has a reputation for being the rather genteel, upmarket part of Gloucestershire. With its Roman provenance and tradition as a spa town it likes to think of itself as the cultural capital of the Cotswolds. Michelin starred restaurants, classy boutiques and Regency-style buildings, give it an ambiance that you wouldn’t think would harbour murderers.  But it’s surprising what tensions and hostilities can fester behind those classic facades as John Bude points out at the beginning of The Cheltenham Square Mystery: 

… as in so many cases, the outward suggestions of the square are by no means compatible with the inward life lived by the people inhabiting it. … though for the most part the community live in amity, the very fact that they live in an enclosed intimacy not to be found in an ordinary road is sufficient to exaggerate such small annoyances and dissensions which from time to time arise.

The underlying rancour between some of the occupants of the square over an old elm-tree, yapping dogs and noisy telephones escalates to physical violence when one of their number is found in his chair with an arrow in the back of his head. The question of course is who killed him. There are plenty of suspects because many of the residents of Regency Square are members of an archery club and are pretty darn good shots. Some of them also have good reason to want the Captain dead since he wasn’t exactly a man who endeared himself. He’d seduced the wife of one of resident, the banker Arthur West, was blackmailing another and had recently come into rather a large sum of money. Oh and he rides a very noisy motorbike which regularly disturbs the peace of this square, a place where:

The general effect is of a quiet residential backwater in which old people can grow becomingly older, undisturbed by the rush and clatter of a generation which has left them nothing but the memories of a past epoch.

For local police the challenge is to how to break through the alibis that most of the residents conveniently seem to possess. There’s another question that perplexes them – how could the perpetrator have walked unnoticed around the Square with a six-foot bow in his (or her) arms? Fortunately reinforcements are to hand in the form of Superintendent Meredith, detective par-excellence with Sussex County Constabulary, who just happens to be staying in the square as the guest of a friend. His bosses give him leave to partner up with Inspector Long, the man in charge of the case. The pair hit it off and have a good old time in clambering over the rooftops and questioning various suspects. Just when they think they’ve nailed it, another resident gets bumped off in almost identical circumstances.

Bude provides a set of potential murderers many of whom are fairly typical of Golden Age crime. We get the respected local doctor and a vicar, a banker, two spinster sisters and a dog-obsessed woman. No butler though there is Alfred who acts as general factotum to one of the residents.  This is a tale that has plenty of various red herrings and blind alleys before reaching the inevitable revelation of the culprit’s identity. There were a few points where I thought the police investigators were a bit slow to grasp the significance of the evidence (even I worked out the identity of the murderer before they did who and I’m no great shakes at this detective lark).  I wouldn’t class this as a page turner or a compelling read but it was enjoyable enough for the most part.

The one aspect that did irritate me was the dialogue. Meredith gets to speak in ‘proper’ English whereas Inspector Long’s dialogue is full of more cheery plebian utterances (Crikey seems to be a favourite) and dropped aitches and Alfred the servant comes with a full-blown rendition of Cockney. Was this Bude’s attempt to differentiate his characters or at attempt at humour (if so, it failed with me). Or was it a reflection of the class consciousness of his era? Either way it was a blot on the reading experience.  The Cheltenham Square Murder isn’t a page turner or a compelling read but it was workmanlike and a reasonably pleasant novel that did a good job of evoking the spirit of Cheltenham’s ‘leisure, culture and tranquility.’

I’ve seen some comments that this isn’t the best of Bude’s work by far – The Cornish Coast Murder and Death on the Riviera are apparently superior in terms of both plot and characterisation. I’ll look out for them next time I’m in the mood for a bit of crime that isn’t sensational or violent but isn’t necessarily ‘cosy’ either.

About the book: The Cheltenham Square Murder was published initially in 1937.  It was re-issued in 2016 as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, an imprint of the Poisoned Pen Press.

About the author: John Bude is the pen-name of a theatrical producer, stage director and playwright, who abandoned the stage to become a prolific writer of detective stories. Over the course of  twenty-five years he wrote some thirty mystery novels, the last of which came out in 1958. The Cheltenham Square Murder is Bude’s fourth mystery novel, but only the third one to feature his series character: Superintendent Meredith of the Sussex County Police.

Why I read this book: I bought this as a gift for my sister who works in Cheltenham and is also a fan of Golden Age Crime. Unfortunately she already had a copy so I got to keep it. I too it off my shelves when I was looking for something to read that was a completely different pace to the novel I had just finished (Hell’s Gate by Laurent Gaudé)

 

 

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What do you need to know about me? 1. I'm from Wales which is one of the countries in the UK and must never be confused with England. 2. My life has always revolved around the written and spoken word. I worked as a journalist for nine years then in international corporate communications 3. My tastes in books are eclectic. I love realism and hate science fiction and science fantasy. 4. I am trying to broaden my reading horizons geographically by reading more books in translation

10 thoughts on “The Cheltenham Square Murder by John Bude [review]

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  • It seems I must read this one too, though crime fiction is not my thing…
    I visited Cheltenham when I was very small. My older sister and I were offloaded onto a childless step-aunt while younger sister was being born. I have vivid memories of broad beans from my uncle’s garden, of seeing a calf just born, of hot chocolate and biscuits at bedtime, and of splendid cakes baked for our birthdays, blue for her and pink for me. We were sorry to go home, except for the broad beans…
    And now I live in Cheltenham in Melbourne. All the streets around us has Cotswold names: Swinden, Cobham, Evesham and so on, and many of the houses have cottage gardens, though not so many in these time poor days, alas. But my guess is that in multicultural Melbourne, most of the residents have no idea of the provenance of the names.
    We went to Cheltenham when we were in the UK in 2010 but we didn’t do a nostalgia trip, we did touristy things like visiting Gustav Holst’s house and the museum. https://hillfamilysoutherndivision.wordpress.com/2010/09/29/cheltenham-28-9-10/
    I don’t think we heard anyone say Crikey!

    Reply
    • Living in Cheltenham and having visited the original location you surely have to read this book. I doubt you’ll care for it that much though…. You could read it on a day when its way to hot to do anything and the brain can’t get beyond first gear

      Reply
      • Ah well, a book like that can be just what a tired brain needs sometimes.

        Reply
  • This is one of about five BLCC that I have waiting to read. I enjoyed The Cornish Coast murder very much, I liked The Lake District murder too though less so. I think some of the kind of dialogue you describe creeps into both.

    Reply
    • I’ll put the Cornish Coast as the one I’ll read first in that case Ali.

      Reply
  • I enjoyed this one a lot, although possibly because I lived in Cheltenham for a while when I was younger! Bude’s dialect for certain characters can be irritating (it’s a trait I’ve notice in some of the other BL reissued authors) but his books are a good, soothing read!

    Reply
    • Seems I’m going to have to grit my teeth on the dialect front in that case

      Reply

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