Enter Blowfish: 'Rain Before Seven' by Christopher Buckley

  

Christopher Buckley’s Rain Before Seven (1947) is a classic country house murder mystery with marginally uncanny elements. It is set in Shropshire: the nearest town, six or seven miles away, is Ludlow, and there are allusions to the Clun villages made famous by A E Housman (‘Clunton and Clunbury,/Clungunford and Clun/Are the quietest places/Under the sun’). The title refers to an English weather saying: ‘rain before seven, fine by eleven’.

 A variety of guests gather at the home of a second-rate (‘not quite bestselling’) romance novelist: none of them are particularly close to her, and some may have reasons to wish her gone. Strangers have been glimpsed in the house and grounds. This is a conventional crime fiction set-up, though neatly done.

 Also in the genre tradition is the knowing nods to other crime fiction authors, offered here through the character of a particularly unprepossessing child, a boy nicknamed Blowfish, who is obsessed by detective stories and refers to several of these as he does his own detecting, including Agatha Christie, G K Chesterton, Dorothy L Sayers and Victor Bridges. The latter is less well-known than the others now, but specialised in stories set in coastal Essex, often with sailing and smuggling aspects.

It is bracingly different that Blowfish is not of the Boy’s Own paragon type, but spoilt, sly, ugly, rude, greedy and self-centred. He is also, however, brainy and devious, and a hugely enjoyable and highly plausible creation.

One character in the book, a worldly artist, has a keen presentiment of evil in a highly effective tableau, after a noise is heard outside, when the dinner party are briefly seen as if frozen in time. The local vicar is also convinced of the active existence of evil powers here. Another unusual aspect is the evocation of Aubrey Beardsley in describing the house party, because of the black and white of the men’s evening dress and the similarly sombre black of the ladies’ gowns, all save the hostess, who is in flaming red. These elements give just a hint of the strange and eerie.

The novel has a picturesque cast of characters and the usual twists and turns and red herrings of the genre and is an accomplished, urbane and lightly-handled example: perhaps just a shade too leisurely in its development. But it is much enhanced by the character of the unprepossessing Blowfish, who uses shrewd observation and logic to find the solution to the mystery. 

The author’s only other novel, Royal Chase (1949), reintroduces Blowfish, to the delight of this reader at least. It is a Ruritanian romp in which a group of English tourists on a cruise become embroiled in the local politics and conspiracies of a country they visit, and are each in turn suspected by some to be the King, returned incognito from exile. But where is the real King and what are his plans? This is a lively and blithe exaggeration of the Anthony Hope mode. Buckley introduces a thoroughly modern denouement. It is Blowfish once again who has the solution first, informed by his intelligent reading, both of books and of character.

Christopher Buckley (1905-50) was a military historian, the author of several official accounts of campaigns, and war correspondent for the Telegraph. He was killed in the Korean War when the jeep he was travelling in struck a land mine. As well as the tragedy for his family and colleagues, this was a loss to literature: his two novels are well-crafted satirical thrillers, and we could have wished for much more of the immortally offensive Blowfish. 

(Mark Valentine)