The Viaduct Murder

As the fog and rain clear one Tuesday afternoon in October, four members of a village golf club decide to fit in a match before evening sets in. One of them slices his drive off the third tee. Following his ball to the foot of the neighboring railway viaduct, he stumbles upon a body. The police soon arrive, but they seem to ignore some odd circumstances noticed by the friends, and the four decide to investigate themselves.

Ronald A. Knox was something of a polymath, who as a boy was fascinated by Sherlock Holmes. He was so interested in mysteries that he wrote and promulgated the “Ten Commandments” for detective fiction; in The Viaduct Murder, the first of his own whodunits, he puts these principles into practice.

Knox was careful to lay the facts before his readers in good faith. But as one of the golfers comments early in this mystery, “Everything tells a story, if you are careful not to theorize beyond your data.” The difficulty in following this maxim leads to a challenging puzzle that holds the reader till the very end.