Murder at the petrol station

The Lake District Murder by John Bude is one of many wonderful British inter-war year murder mysteries which are currently being reissued to make them available for a new generation (see my review here of a previous novel by the same author). The plot follows a police investigation into a murder that had initially appeared as a suicide. The book is set in the less scenic part of the Lake District near to Whitehaven and the story takes place in a petrol station/garage and pubs.

We follow Inspector Meredith as he and his colleagues come up with theories as to what lay behind the murder of a man in the petrol station he owned and who committed it, not all of which work out as expected. The plot is the main strength of this story and it is well worked out with the reader following the reasoning of the police as the story progresses. Unfortunately, the pace suffers in places as we are given a lot of technical detail into how the police plan to prove the practicalities of some of their theories (eg how to prove possible fraud relating to discrepancies between volumes of fuel purchased and volumes delivered, etc.). I didn’t mind a bit of this as I felt that it added a degree of authenticity to the plot, especially if you bear in mind this involves policing at a time when they did not have the technical resources that they have available these days, but it did occasionally slow the narrative down.

There is plenty to enjoy about this story although I must admit a couple of the actions taken by the police struck me as being highly questionable as well as the justification for them by the senior officers in terms of ‘the end justify the means’. I also felt at times that the police seemed to have forgotten that they were trying to find out who actually committed the murder as they seemed to spend a lot of time focusing on why it had been committed.

These issues are just niggles though because this is a great story and fascinating to read with lots of detail of a time and a place nearly 100 years distant.