Golden Age of Detective Fiction

On the eve before his wedding to Lady Eileen Meredith, American politician and adventurer Robert Grell dines with his long-time friend, Sir Ralph Fairfield, at their private club. Around 9:00 pm, Grell leaves the club to run a mysterious errand, and he asks Fairchild to tell anyone who may call for him while he’s out that he is engaged in a meeting. Fairchild reluctantly agrees and stays at the club, waiting for Grell’s return. While Grell is away, Lady Eileen Meredith calls, and Fairchild clumsily lies for Grell. However, Grell never returns to the club, and a worried Fairchild goes to Grell’s house. Inside Grell’s study is a dead body, and Grell has disappeared. C.I.D. man Heldon Foyle is called in to solve the case.

The Review

The Grell Mystery is a first rate police proceduaral written by career detective Frank Froest and it shows. A lot of police procedurals vaguely set up a chain of command or attempt to fudge the details on how a police force would investigate a crime and for careful readers this element may fall flat or hollow, but Froest spends just the right amount of time initiating his readers into the police chain of command and getting the mechanics of how a police unit would investigate a murder and a disappearance without it being the central focus of the story. It’s merely the scaffolding on which the rest of the story is hung.

The first half of The Grell Mystery, which is primarily a manhunt for the killer, moves swiftly for a police procedural and is imbued with a lot of natural action as Foyle raids people’s houses and opium dens and investigates barges and the seedy back alleys of London’s poorer districts. There’s a lot of gunplay, gamesmanship with suspects, a train ride where a police officer is drugged, and another action-packed episode where a detective is kidnapped, and his police brethren decide to leave him to his fate. So many things are happening that keep searching for Robert Grell fresh.

The story’s first half also spends much time shadowing Fairchild, Lady Eileen Meredith, and Grell’s previous lover, Lola Rachel. The three main suspects often team up and break apart, and the never-ending combinations of allies and enemies give the reader a good look at each character. They are all friends of Grell and his foes at different times, and the shifting alliances cause a lot of doubt about who the killer may be.

However, the story’s second half drags a little as it settles into the everyday minutiae of a police procedural. The reader sees how Foyle and his various team members investigate crimes, conduct interviews, and pressure suspects to catch them in small lies and crimes. A more complete picture of Foyle and his team comes to the fore. I was less of a fan of the last portion of the book, where Foyle painstakingly goes through how each suspect could have committed the murder and then exonerating them or not.

Another flaw with The Grell Mystery is it’s frequent antisemitism and racist depictions of Jewish characters. The story is written in 1913 so this is not surprising, but it is disappointing and did decrease my overall enjoyment of The Grell Mystery and might make this story unsuitable for some readers.