Ashton-Kirk, Investigator
In this volume, Ashton-Kirk's Watson is a man of his own class named Pendleton, an unadventurous soul drawn unwillingly into adventure, rather like Poirot's Hastings.I find McIntyre's amateur detective curiously colourless. And yet I quite enjoyed the unfolding of this mystery, mostly for its bizarre elements. The case opens conventionally with a woman in distress, Edyth Vale. Her beloved, Allan Morris, is somehow at the mercy of a "mocking monster", an antiquarian named Hume. Hume is murdered & Morris comes under suspicion. The murder weapon is the first bizarre element - a bayonet. Then there's a plethora of pictures of the same general, a shorthand message left in candle-wax upon the stairs, and a mysterious deaf mute scientist (who devises an explosive end for himself).
The murder is committed, it turns out, over plans for a heavier-than-air flying machine, concealed behind a portrait (the plans, not the machine!) And more than that I will not say, including any discussion of the actual murderer.
