“How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail,

And pour the waters of the Nile on every golden scale?

How cheerfully he seems to grin, how neatly spread his claws,

And welcomes little fishes in, with gently smiling jaws.”

Lewis Carroll, Alice In Wonderland

The Beverly Club, a society for connoisseurs of crime, has a problem. One of its members was accused of a murder, only to be eventually exonerated after a trial. He contacts the club with news that he knows who did actually kill Sir Derek Livingstone, a retired judge.

Who were the mysterious visitors that Sir Derek saw on the afternoon of his death? Why – and how – did his body disappear from his study and then reappear in the garden? It doesn’t seem to be a case of who hated him enough to kill him? It seems more of a case of who liked him enough not to kill him…

Some back-story is needed here. As it’s half-term, that means I can pop to the Bodleian and read some deeply obscure murder mysteries – well, one or two. As it’s been a while, I thought I’d ask my book club to suggest something deeply obscure. Tempting though it might be to find something obscure from Leonard Gribble, Brad from Ah, Sweet Mystery! is (or will be) the expert there, so I took a suggestion from JJ of The Invisible Event and went for this one.

Peter Shaffer’s The Woman In The Wardrobe has been long lusted after by collectors and when it was reprinted by the British Library in the Crime Classics range, there was hope that this would mean that the two subsequent titles that he wrote with his brother Antony (hence Peter Antony) would follow. In fact, the opposite happened and for some reason presumably involving the rights to the book, The Woman In The Wardrobe was withdrawn from sale. Copies of that reprint go for around forty quid these days. But because of this, it looks like reprints of How Doth The Little Crocodile? and Withered Murder are further away than ever.

Copies of How Doth The Little Crocodile? are few and far between, with the cheapest going for a couple of hundred quid, so should you fork that out for a copy of this? In my opinion, no, not really. It’s not a patch on The Woman In The Wardrobe.

So what’s wrong with it? Well first of all, it’s all a bit miserable. Mr Verity never stops going on about how awful the village of Allsop is. You might recall the comedy aspects in Mrs McGinty’s Dead where Poirot has to put up with the basics in the house where he is staying. It’s rather fun because Christie writes it with such a light touch and it only appears occasionally. Here, it seems that on every page, Verity is moaning about this and that (especially the local pub), or saying how rotten the suspects all are. And they are, too. I get the feeling that the authors think they’re playing this for laughs, but it just feels like they having a pop at life outside of London. Not entire sure what using the word “whore” when referring to one character adds to the narrative either.

And the plot… well, it’s certainly got a traditional Golden Age plot to it – I’d question how well clued it is but to honest, I was tuning out towards the end. However… how shall I put this… it’s really dumb. The villain’s motivation is ridiculous and while I did guess the killer, it was more in the sense of “that’s the only way to make the solution interesting” although it still didn’t make sense.

I’d be curious to know what the other three people who’ve read this think of it, but on the off-chance you have a spare few hundred quid, there are better ways of spending it.