The Case of the Missing Bronte

Brilliant, witty, verbal caricaturist Robert Barnard can't hit a homerun every time he comes up to bat. He's my favorite British mystery writer; I've read all forty of his gems, but this one does not rank among his best. Whenever certain crime novelists introduce thugs or gangsters into their books, the story becomes less interesting, less authentic because it's more fascinating to follow the felonies of supposedly law-abiding citizens. The criminal classes provide an easy way out because they murder for a living while the amateurs confound the police with their more devious motives and methods. This book is less concerned with murder, and is more concerned with the violent beatings sustained by ordinary folk involved in the discovery of a previously unknown Brontë work. It starts in a pub when a little old lady approaches big and burly Scotland Yard Superintendent Perry Trethowan, Barnard's sometime series copper, and his wife Jan with a piece of old paper that has handwriting eerily resembling that of the Brontës. In the book the manuscript really gets around as we follow the misdeeds of greedy collector-villains and the hired goons. Barnard is as funny as ever with his assembled cast of oddballs and his Yorkshire on wry cracks. He has a keen insight into what makes English society click, its quirky little cul de sacs of human behavior. Eccentrics are strewn all over his landscape. He sprinkles scorn on humbugs. A quote: "Politician's blather is to impress, suspects' blather is to gain time." He has in this book, some satiric, nasty, devastating critiques of people and institutions, British education, and society in general. Barnard can never really disappoint me. His stories are well-paced with his engaging characters and intriguing plots. You glide through his books awaiting his assorted nut cases and funny asides. Individual scenes such as the one in the tabernacle are superbly imagined.

Real funny, if your were to read any of his books the humour in them is bound to attract the reader's attention, the suspence is nothing to write home about and lacks the class and elan of Gardner.