This 1935 work is a surprisingly gruesome mystery which opens with the discovery of a dismembered corpse - head missing - in a milk-churn collected from a small dairy farm. The local police waste no time in summoning Scotland Yard, while Inspector Arnold is almost as quick in summoning his usual sidekick, ex-Secret Service man Desmond Merrion. A double mystery then evolves, when contradictory evidence is found with the remains---some of it seemingly identifying the victim, some of it pointing in quite a different direction. It is Merrion's belief that the former is a false trail, meant to mislead the police, the latter left with the body by someone other than the killer, who wants the murder solved... The Milk-Churn Murder is a good but not a great mystery, having a couple of serious flaws that prevent it from being wholly satisfactory. In the first place, we never really get to grips with why the killer should leave the remains where they will be found, particularly since that choice necessitates the removal of the head---why not just bury the thing? (Likewise the subsequent disposal of the head itself.) The main problem here, however, is the use of Inspector Arnold. I appreciate that he and Merrion are supposed to have a yin-and-yang sort of partnership, the dogged professional and the imaginative amateur; but in the interests of making Merrion the hero, Arnold comes across as unforgivably dim, taking all the evidence at face-value and refusing to accept Merrion's interpretation of the case, even when he is proven right again and again. However, at the story level, The Milk-Churn Murder is a gripping procedural, as the detectives work painstakingly to discover the identity of the victim, and then who had motive to kill him---and who, conversely, seems to be risking their own safety to assist the investigation. There are two more murders along the way (one of them as gruesome as the first and, unusually for a Golden Age mystery, genuinely upsetting), while the story climaxes in a suspenseful pursuit that allows Arnold to redeem himself somewhat.

"Bradlaw went down, had a look at the churn, and fetched it up here. He turned it out into a tub, and found that it contained quite a lot of wholly unexpected things. In the first place, there was the dismembered body of a man, complete but for the head, which is missing. The other things are being dried. You can look at them presently. They consist of an old leather wallet, falling to pieces from being soaked in the liquid, a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, with the lenses missing, a railway and omnibus guide for the city of Exeter, the key of a room in an hotel, and an ivory-handled carving-knife. These last two objects were wrapped up in a flannel vest, which is badly stained, apparently with blood, and has a gash in its behind..."