19. The Cuckoo Line Affair by Andrew Garve

I found three Andrew Garve's at Moe's after they were recommended by an aligned soul on the internet.  The cover designs would have been enough for me to at least take one.  The Cuckoo Line Affair really threw me and I think part of my pleasure was the mixed expectations as by the time I got to the end, it evolved from real curious excitement to more of a standard semi-cozy investigative mystery.  

After reading Boomerang, I assumed that Garve's work was in the 20th century British men's adventure sub-genre, à la the great Desmond Bagley (and his wife Joan Margaret Brown).  The Cuckoo Line Affair begins with a static description of an eccentric old man Andrew Latimer, briefly a member of parliament who lives in a cottage out in the country, putters around in his garden, plays with the local neighbour child, has a bunch of civic responsibilities and makes a small amount of money writing political gossip columns for various newspapers.  He has two sons who are making their way in the world and an old maid daughter who lives with him and takes care of him.  We are well into the second chapter, describing one of his rare trips by train to London and I am trying to figure out how any of this, as pleasant as it was to read about, was going to evolve into a challenging conflict with elements and/or man in some interesting foreign location.  

Well at the end of the second chapter things do get weird!  He is alone in a carriage with a young woman on the old and rickety Cuckoo Line. She gets some coal in her eye and asks him to help her get it out.  The next thing he knows, they are kissing!  So we do get a real plot, but it isn't an adventure story as much as an investigation.  Latimer is accused of assaulting the woman and finds himself in real trouble.  His two sons, one who is a lawyer and the other a crime fiction writer, have to figure out how to defend him and also figure out what actually happened.  There is a lot of neat stuff around these muddy inlets in Essex (I think?!) and puzzling out the complexities of the crime kept me engaged and interested.  The ending, however, had an early climax and then somewhat of an anti-climax, where everything depended on getting a certain piece of evidence and convincing the prosecuting attorney of something.  It was all very pleasant and I wish I had a nice english cottage with a garden and marshy lands to poke around in.  I also was happy for the Latimer family and appreciated that Hugh, the investigating son, brought his fiancée Cynthia into it and she was actually responsible for several of the crucial clues.