Inspector Tibbett however thinks there may be more to it … And it is in Quince’s waiting room that the strangled body of one of the two men is found and the other is promptly arrested for the crime. Quince heads off to America and soon decides it must be Finch and invites both men to his office.
In this case, when family solicitor Ambrose Quince is tasked with finding Simon Warwick, who was adopted by an American family whose name and details are now completely lost, he knows he can only advertise in the papers and wait for the claimants to come to him – which they presently do, the list of candidates limited to only two: Harold Benson and Simon Finch. The true-life stories about Martin Guerre and the claimant to the Titchborne baronetcy have long exerted a powerful influence in fiction – Agatha Christie was a bit obsessed with it while Josephine Tey’s Bratt Farrar, the French film The Return of Martin Guerre, Pirandollo’s Il Fu Mattia Pascal and even Don Draper in Mad Men all offer variations on the theme. “Good heavens, d’you mean Scotland Yard?” I submit this review for Bev’s 2015 Silver Age Vintage Mystery Challenge and Patti Abbott’s Friday’s Forgotten Books meme over at her fab Pattinase blog. But will the real Simon Warwick step forward and take over the company? A wealthy industrialist, on being told he has only a few months to live, decides to cut everybody out of his will if he can find a long-lost nephew put up for adoption when his parents were killed in the war.
It is based on a classic scenario from popular culture – the long-lost heir of who may or not be genuine – and comes up with a terrific variation. This smart detective story provides a really entertaining bridge between the Golden era of pure deduction and the modern scientific age.
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