Cut Throat – Christopher Bush (1932)

I got a bit caught up in the excitement of the Christopher Bush reissues around 2017-18.  With a mostly unheard of mystery writer who had published over 60 novels, I bought into the hype that maybe we had our next Christie or Carr to dive into.  Cut Throat and The Case of the April Fools seemed to be the better reviewed books at the time, so I picked those up.  Somehow I also ended up with The Case of the Three Strange Faces, which I don’t even recall seeing reviewed anywhere, as well as Dancing Death, which I received as a gift.  I ended up reading Dancing Death first, and it was a total dud that burst my Bush balloon.  It wasn’t an awful book, it just wasn’t worth reading.

So now a few years later I finally worked up my courage/curiosity enough to give Bush another chance.  Dozens of other Bush titles have been reissued in the meantime, but I decided to go with Cut Throat as it still seems to crop up whenever anyone mentions Bush’s best work.

This one’s a bit of a mixed bag.  The solution to the mystery is really solid, and is bound to appeal to fans of impossible problem shenanigans.  I’m tempted to make a comparison to John Dickson Carr, but Carr layered his stories with a lot more misdirection that we get here.  Still, Cut Throat does feature a really clever solution.  It was a trudge to get there though.  I struggled to make it through the first half, heavily tempted to give up.  The second half featured some plot developments that lessened the toil, but the satisfying portions of the read only really come in the final dozen or so pages.  I attribute this to Christopher Bush’s writing, although I can’t quite put my finger on the issue.

Do you ever find yourself reading a page and then realizing that you’re midway through it but you don’t remember anything that you read?  And so then you go back and reread to where you were, and you’re like “boy, I don’t remember any of this, good thing I caught myself.”  When that normally happens to me, it’s because my mind ended up wandering on some subject, like a tangent from something I just read, or maybe I’m thinking about what to cook for dinner.  That’s my fault, and I just have to adjust my attention and get back to reading, or take a break and go focus on whatever thought distracted me.

With Bush though, I encountered a more uncommon phenomenon: I’m actively reading and trying to process what is going on, but there’s just something about the writing where nothing is clicking.  An extreme case of this was when I slogged my way through a dozen densely written pages of Michael Innes’ Hamlet Revenge, before realizing that I could barely summarize a speck of what happened, and nor did I care to finish the book.  Bush isn’t that extreme because his writing comes across as simple and straight forward, but there’s just something I can’t put my finger on where my brain rejects processing the writing into a narrative.

Through the haze of the first few chapters we get the murder of a newspaper magnate, his body stuffed into a large hamper along with a bunch of cabbage leaves.  That sounds kind of interesting, but the delivery wasn’t.  Bush’s duo of series detectives Ludovic Travers and Superintendent Wharton eventually track the hamper’s movement to the small town where the victim lived, and the story immediately tightens in on five suspects; not because of any actual detection mind you, but because there are simply five characters that we encounter.

Now, much ado is made of Bush as a writer of impossible alibi problems, and the Dean Street Press edition of Cut Throat is plastered with mentions of a cast iron alibi – which feels a bit spoilerish because you simply have to look for the one character with an air tight alibi.  And indeed, it is trumpeted repeatedly that one of the suspects has an air tight alibi, although oddly we don’t actually learn what the alibi is until the final third of the novel.  The scene in which we finally learn the circumstances of said alibi is the only passage in the entire book with an astute focus on detail, and it blatantly comes across as “this is the scene where you should pay very close attention to how individual X could have somehow found a three minute window in which to commit the murder.”  And honestly, a three minute window leads to such an extreme time table problem that my eyes end up glazing over.

But, aha, Travers springs a clever solution in a (finally) interesting denouement in which he recreates the circumstances of the crime, and it’s a gripping read.  Bush’s use of a multi-layered trick gives way to an especially well thought out murder, and I think I’ll remember the ending for some time.

I walk away from Cut Throat almost compelled to read something else by Bush.  The Case of the Missing Minutes seems to be well regarded, although the title suggests a very similar timetable problem.  I further hesitate because I don’t seem to be clicking with Bush’s writing style.  Perhaps I’ll cool off for a year and get back to him.