Detective on holiday: E. H. CLEMENTS, Bright Intervals (1940)

Bright Intervals was Eileen Helen Clements' second novel. Her first, Let Him Die, had appeared the year before, her first mystery and the introduction to her series detective Alister Woodhead, who would subsequently appear in twelve more mystery/thrillers. Clements also later wrote a number of stand-alone crime-themed novels that didn't feature Woodhead. Bright Intervals, however, is a more or less one-of-a-kind (so far as I know) experiment, in that it features Woodhead and the Chattans, the charming, slightly eccentric family with whom he had solved a murder in Let Him Die, marrying into the family in the process, but this time simply on holiday in Devon, with no detecting in sight. Rather like if Christie had written a novel about the domestic turmoil Poirot and Hastings encounter in a ramshackle holiday hotel, or about Miss Marple and her nephew Raymond venturing on a murder-free cruise and helping the ship's chef reunite with his lost love. (Now that I think of it, I really wish she had written those…) Certainly, some mystery novels become as much about other things as about crime—examples like The Nine Tailors or Surfeit of Lampreys could arguably leave out the murders altogether and still be delightful novels—but I can't think of another example where a detective is used without a trace of a mystery element. Can you?

It's an interesting and charming experiment, and certainly makes me want to read other Woodhead titles. I wrote here (almost a decade ago, no less) about Cherry Harvest (1943), and noted that though Woodhead does put in an appearance (his first after Bright Intervals), it's a brief one. Perhaps that was why I seem to have been a bit lukewarm on it. He seems to play a bigger role in Clements' subsequent book, Berry Green (1945). Alister is a charming, odd character—kind and loving, but fiercely anti-social with most people, and with a gruff sense of humor that can take one aback. When the family's legal guardian, whom all adore, falls ill:

"I'm going to see Graham—to cheer him up."

"How?"

"I'm going to show him my stamp collection.''

"God help him," said Alister wearily. "I give you up. I give you all up. If he's sickening for scarlet fever, may you all catch it and die miserably."

Or, his method of "comforting" one of the youngsters during a storm:

"I say, Alister, that was a good one, wasn't it? Was it a thunderbolt, do you think?"

"I expect so. You go to sleep."

"Have you ever known anyone that was struck by lightning?"

"No. But I know several who ought to be. Shut up and turn over."

But it's a sense of humor I relate to, and children often do seem to be delighted by light-hearted verbal abuse, so I soon got rather attached to Alister.

The plot, of course, is rather beside the point. Family holiday in Devon, oldest son slightly troubled and younger than his age, mixup with tawdry well-to-do folks, tensions around Graham's guardianship and around his surprise engagement to a fiancee who is none too sure about having her beau so deeply enmeshed in a whole family's problems and affections. Mostly played for laughs, and mostly effective laughs at that. Predictable, of course, and not an absolute favorite, but a very charming, entertaining read. I am now requesting Let Him Die from interlibrary loan so I can see how all the characters were introduced, and how they worked together in solving a murder. I would think it won't be long till we see Clements back in print from one of the several excellent publishers now focused on Golden Age mysteries, but whenever that happens, I do hope they include this one in their batch and don't shunt it aside because no one gets murdered.

I was inspired to read this one—and at least one other book I'll mention soon—because I've been hard at work on both a new batch of authors to add to my main list and, perhaps of more interest overall, a thorough revamping and expansion of my long out-of-date Mystery List (of which you can see the woefully inadequate and outdated current version here). I've not only more than doubled the number of authors on the list, thanks both to having added many, many new authors to the main list since 2016 when I last updated the Mystery List, but also thanks to more in-depth research and the book reviews to be found on the British Newspaper Archive. As I look up lots of titles in order to make the info on the new Mystery List as thorough and complete as possible, I've come to a number of books I just couldn't resist getting my hands on. Bright Intervals being one, and a quite enjoyable one at that.

My obsessive research both on new authors and on mystery writers in particular is thus one reason I haven't got round to reviewing as much as I would like. But rest assured, I am diligently working away behind the scenes, and the payoff will be the much bigger Mystery List, coming "soon". You know how fluid that word often is with me, but I really do plan to finish in the next couple of months…