The Red Dwarf

"The Draycott Murder Mystery" by Molly Thynne was originally published as The Red Dwarf in the UK.

Young farmer John Leslie comes home to his farm one stormy night and finds a luxuriously clad woman who has been shot in his sitting room. He calls the police and, as he has no alibi, he is soon the main suspect and brought to London. However, his aristocratic fiancée as well as the circle of upper class friends she moves in are convinced of his innocence and set out to prove it.
There are quite a lot of characters, but the reader mainly follows Allen Fayre, who has recently returned from India and has too much time on his hands, so he cannot help himself but try to support the star lawyer who has taken on the case at the fiancées show more bidding.
I enjoyed this story very much because I liked the characters and the story, and it is well written. The style is quite literary. The author was aristocratic herself, and apart from the whodunit she paints a vivid portrait of the 1920s in the English countryside as experienced by her class. She wrote five more crime novels and I am looking forward to reading them in the future. show less

I found this Golden Age mystery quite a pleasant story, although never riveting. For my tastes, there was too much lucky coincidence and stumbling over pieces of evidence by chance.

The prose was easy to read, but with some odd formatting that sometimes made it difficult to work out who was talking, entailing backtracking. And there was a lot of talking! Pages and pages of characters telling each other the plot. I may have skimmed a little 😳

As to the actual storyline, I found it odd that everyone was so convinced that the outlook was bad for the (wrongly accused - that's hardly a big spoiler!) defendant based on the stated evidence against him, although obviously investigative methodology/technology was different nearly a century ago. show more The other thing that struck me was a lot of travel between (roughly) Carlisle and London. That's over 300 miles, which surely couldn't have been a trivial journey but somehow didn't come across as a big deal (apart from when the plot needed it to be...)

My major criticism is a feeling that the author wasn't playing fair with the reader. Someone would find out something Very Important (with lots of reflection on How Important This Was), but the reader wouldn't be allowed to learn the information at the same time the character did. That possibly reflects the age of the writing, but always leaves me with a feeling that the author is cheating. show less

Despite the fact that I guessed the identity of the murderer long before the end, I enjoyed reading about Fayre working on the case.