This book starts with a job interview. An elderly man (Thewless1), engaged in the business of tutoring schoolboys during their vacations needs to secure his next gig. He’s a little wary, for the father (a widower) of this boy is a celebrated scientist. The family home is on a ritzy street and the home’s curb appeal is a little… ostentatious, it seems to the tutor, who has burned by celebrity scientists who live on ritzy streets and demonstrate their wealth so openly, for they often turn out to be unable to pay people like tutors. But, while waiting in the scientist’s study, he recognizes a Velasquez of a dark-haired, blue-eyed boy, holding a gun at an angle (this becomes important later), and realizes that this is real money.
His next concern is that the boy is said to be “a bit of a handful” – biting people during rugby and pitching a cream pitcher at an aristocratic friend of the father’s. The father says that the boy is precocious in some ways (sexy poetry, science books) while, at the same time, being backwards in other ways (girls, comic books, spelling and grammar); and that Humphrey’s imagination can run a little wild. But this is right up the tutor’s alley: he is used to having settle boys down and force them to study enough that they can pass their exams. It’s his niche.
But before he can begin to focus on his next worry – salary and such – the doorbell rings, the butler enters and hands the father a business card. The father immediately hands the tutor over to the butler who escorts him out, passing, as he exits through the front door, a young man of athletic build and extreme confidence. Oh dear, the tutor sighs, that fellow will get the job.
And, indeed that is the case. However the other young man (Cox) is unable to meet with Humphrey, who refuses to emerge while he is there. Over lunch, Cox and the father discuss the engagement, which includes purchasing a hunting rifle for Humphrey, meeting him at the train station, and escorting him across England by train, across the Irish channel by boat, then across Ireland to a distant cousin’s family estate (the father has actually never met the Bolderwoods), where Humphrey will spend his vacation.
As soon as Cox leaves the house, he is chased down by a schoolboy who demands, “Are you my new tutor?” and they make a date to drop off their bags, purchase a rifle, and then take in a movie on their way to the train station. But then the father receives a telegram from Cox regretfully declining the job and the father scrambles to engage Thewless after all, offering him three times the going rate, which immediately raises suspicions about how much of a “handful” the boy really is.
He quickly finds out when meeting the boy and his father at the train station. Finally over 30 minutes late, the boy emerges from a taxi alone, and immediately demands to see Thewless’s passport, and then to verify his tutor’s identity in several other ways. When they pick up the boy’s bags from the luggage check-in, the clerk also hands him a gun, which the boy receives with a mixture of excitement (oh, cool, a gun!) and reticence (oh, I don’t want to shoot living animals!), creating a bit of a scene. Finally, taking the gun, they race for their first class carriage, which they discover to be sharing with an “elderly” lady2 and a recreational fisherman with all-new equipment.
The boy’s behavior on the train increases Thewless’s suspicions and worries: Humphrey curls up like a small child, sucking on his thumb; then he starts talking wildly about blackmailers and conspiracies; and Thewless is concerned that the elderly lady’s conversation with Humphrey about spy novels has inflamed the boy’s imagination. Then the boy disappears entirely and Thewless cannot find him from one end of the train to the other. Alternately, the tutor worries that “Humphrey” is an imposter – a fake Humphrey in league with the bearded fisherman, while the real Humphrey is kidnapped. When Thewless returns from searching the train, the cabin is empty but, as they pull into a station, the fisherman returns, declares “my stop” and moves his bags to the platform, including an instrument case that is large enough to hold a young boy, and looks suspiciously heavy. But then Humphrey, looking a little worse for wear, reappears; followed, after a discrete pause, by the lady who Thewless now learns, will also be traveling to Ireland, in fact to a small town near the the estate where he and Humphrey will be staying.
When they reach the station where they will move from train to boat, the boy steps off the train onto the dark platform, carrying his rifle, and turns back to say something to Thewless and incidentally strikes a pose that reminds Thewless of the painting in the father’s study, and Thewless comes down to reality with a bump. Of course, this is Humphrey – that’s why the father collected that painting. And Thewless chides himself: he must not let himself get swept up in Humphrey’s sense of the dramatic; he must stay grounded and keep Humphrey grounded and knock some Latin into him. So, when Humphrey tries to tell Thewless that someone tried to kidnap him on the train, Thewless reads him a nice little lecture about adolescent imagination that Humphrey takes with a grain of salt.
Meanwhile, back in London, Inspector Cadover3 has taken on the case of a John Doe found shot dead in the last row of a rowdy movie. He’s a John Doe because someone has cut the nametags out of his clothes; they couldn’t cut the initials out of his underwear so they know he’s JC. It looks like his movie ticket was purchased with two others and that he arrived with a schoolboy, the third ticket taken by a lady on the aisle, both the schoolboy and lady had left before the lights came up. On the other side of the schoolboy, coincidentally sat another schoolboy who had purchased his ticket and the ticket of his female companion separately from the other three – and he also departed, even while the movie was still happening, even before the most important scene.
Most of the book alternates between Cadover’s mystery in London and Humphrey and Thewless’s journey and adventures upon arrival at his cousin’s estate. And it is a page turner – at 400 pages, you have to be careful not to start it in the evening because you will stay up all night, reading, as I did.
How could you resist a book that includes a carnival show, blackmailers, train wrecks, a haunted house, impersonations, a spooky cave, spies, and two sets of kidnappers? Just when you think, I’ll put it down at the end of this page, at the end of this chapter, but then something else hilarious and exciting happens… and before you know it, it’s 3 a.m. and you can’t put the dang thing down.
Darn you, Michael Innes!
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