C S Lewis and the Body in the Basement (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 1) (29 page)

‘She’s told the police all this?’ I asked.

‘She has,’ said Jack.

‘And she was the woman boarder I failed to see on my visit to Plumpton-on-Sea?’

‘I’m afraid she was. But her very insistence, through her land lady, on privacy that amounted to secrecy made me certain it was her.’

‘Horrible business,’ growled Warnie. ‘Indecent business.’

‘Tragic,’ Jack agreed, ‘but the consequence of corrupt human nature unrestrained by Christian civilisation.’

Then Warnie grinned hugely and said, ‘At least all the puzzles have been solved. I knew you’d beat the Scotland Yard boys at their own game. I had every confidence in you, Jack.’ Warnie turned to me and with a wink said, ‘Brain the size of the Albert Hall—you know that, don’t you? Now, Jack: I take it we are free to resume our walking holiday?’

‘First thing tomorrow morning. We’ve had enough excitement for one day, and we all need a good night’s sleep before we go back on the road.’

I’d been thinking about Warnie’s words and said, ‘I am impressed. That puzzle looked complicated and impossible to solve, and yet you wrestled with it, Jack, until you found the solution.’

‘It’s worth wrestling with the big questions of life, young Morris,’ said Jack with a cheerful grin. ‘And to keep on wrestling until you come to the solution.’

This adventure in which C. S. Lewis helps to investigate a grisly murder is entirely fictitious. However, Lewis, his brother Warnie and various friends often went on walking holidays of the kind described. A few of those real-life friends are mentioned in the text: J. R. R. Tolkien (‘Tollers’), Hugo Dyson and Owen Barfield.

The story is set in 1933, just after the publication of Lewis’s first book,
The Pilgrim’s Regress
. This was slap bang in the middle of what is often called the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, when great writers such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Freeman Wills Crofts, Erle Stanley Gardner and Margery Allingham were plying their trade. Several famous fictional detectives created by these writers are mentioned in the text: Hercule Poirot (Christie), Lord Peter Wimsey (Sayers), Inspector Joseph French (Crofts) and Albert Campion (Allingham). Also mentioned is the American writer John Dickson Carr, whose 1930 book
It Walks by Night
was his first featuring a kind of problem for which he became famous: the locked-room mystery.

There are a handful of other period references in the book:

•   Ben Travers (1886–1980) was an English playwright best known for a series of popular farces staged in London in the 1920s and ’30s.

•   An Aga cooker was a popular brand of stove heated by wood or coal.

•   ‘Constance Kent and the Road Hill House murder’ refers to a notorious 1860s case in Wiltshire, UK, in which a three-year-old boy, Francis Kent, was murdered by his sixteen-year-old half-sister, Constance.

•   
The Golden Bough
by Scottish anthropologist James Frazer was a twelve-volume history of human beliefs from primitive magic to modern science. It was highly influential in the early twentieth century.

•   The ‘interplanetary books’ of early British science fiction writer H. G. Wells included
The War of the Worlds
and
The First Men in the Moon
.