Murder by Matchlight

Murder by Matchlight by Edith Caroline Rivett

Murder by Matchlight centres on Bruce Mallaig, a thirty-year-old analytical chemist, who spends a solitary foggy November evening wandering through blacked-out Regent's Park after his fiancée Pat's leave is cancelled. Sitting by the lake near the small wooden bridge leading to York Gate, he overhears a man clamber over the bridge railings to hide on the towpath below, followed by a second man who arrives calling "Anyone about?" in an Irish-sounding voice. This second man strikes a match to light a cigarette, and in its brief glow Mallaig glimpses a third, unidentified face looming behind him moments before he hears a thud and a body falling. Mallaig struggles to detain the man who had hidden under the bridge, shouting for police, and a constable arrives to find the victim dead, his skull smashed. The captured man, Stanley Claydon, a discharged, asthmatic ex-soldier, explains he had overheard a telephone call at St. Pancras Station that morning in which a man calling himself "Tim" arranged a confrontational meeting with someone named "Joe" at the bridge, and curiosity drew him to eavesdrop from below. Both Mallaig's and Claydon's accounts are corroborated independently, puzzling Inspector Wright and Chief Inspector Macdonald, who takes over the case: neither witness heard the killer's footsteps, though Mallaig insists he saw a face in the matchlight. The dead man, carrying an Identity Card for "John Ward," is traced to a shabby rented room at Belfort Grove, Notting Hill, where neighbours—the variety performer Rosie Willing, the conjuring couple Mr. and Mrs. Rameses, and the scholarly Mr. Carringford—describe him as a charming, penniless, Irish con man and petty black-marketeer with no verifiable past. Macdonald discovers the Identity Card originally belonged to a different, genuine John Ward, a Dulverton Place lodger killed in an air-raid shelter bombing, strongly suggesting the dead man stole a bombing victim's identity. Evidence points to a man called Tim, whose identity disc was found in the same bombed shelter. Macdonald reconstructs the crime scene, testing whether a silent bicycle could have let an assailant approach unheard, and investigates suspects including the acrobatic Mr. Rameses (who owns a trick-riding bicycle and lifelike stage masks), the surgeon Ross Lane (who was walking nearby that night), and Mr. Carringford. Ross Lane and his wife, Dr. Josephine Falton, eventually admit that Tim was her first husband, presumed dead, who had resurfaced to blackmail her over her bigamous remarriage, and that Ross Lane himself had gone to the bridge intending to confront him. A theatrical rival, Veroten, further complicates matters by claiming Rameses' hand lacked a telltale wart during the murder window, suggesting an impersonator performed his stage act that night, while Macdonald continues tracing the dead man's movements on the day of his death, including a lunch at the Scarlet Petticoat snack bar and a side trip to the Elstree film studios.

By Edith Caroline Rivett · First published 1945 · Genre: Mystery, Detective Fiction, Crime Fiction · 48 chapters · 66,143 words

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“Well, the war’s done one thing at any rate. It’s got rid of those damned awful railings.”

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fiction · mystery

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Murder by Matchlight is listed on Textopian as a novel by Edith Caroline Rivett, dated 1945 CE.

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