About a year ago I talked about one of the last Inspector Treadgold mysteries by Anthony Weymouth, the pseudonym of Ivo Geikie Cobb (1887-1953), a London physician and author. Cobb wrote a number of books on clinical topics and seven detective novels about Inspector Treadgold of Scotland Yard as well as an autobiography. The Golden Age of Detection wiki (http://gadetection.pbworks.com/w/page/7932446/Weymouth%2C%20Anthony) lists his crime fiction bibliography as follows:
- Frozen Death (Arthur Barker, 1934)
- The Doctors Are Doubtful (Arthur Barker, 1935)
- No, Sir Jeremy (Arthur Barker, 1935)
- Hard Liver (Arthur Barker, 1936)
- Cornish Crime (Hodder & Stoughton, 1937)
- Tempt Me Not (Rich & Cowan, 1937)
- Inspector Treadgold Investigates (Rich & Cowan, 1941)
When I first mentioned them the Weymouth books were exceedingly scarce, not to be found outside the rare book collections of a few major libraries, mostly in the United Kingdom. But earlier this year Merlin Classic Crime reprinted all seven of them in electronic form. They are available via Amazon. Unfortunately they all seem to have typos and formatting errors but at least we can read the books without paying a fortune for a valuable first edition.
Inspector Treadgold is described as a small untidy man with a mustache. He is great friends with his manager Superintendent Foxgrove. Treadgold lives alone and often dines with the Foxgrove household. In Hard Liver (Arthur Barker, 1936) Treadgold is sent to the Sussex household of the late Sir Aylmer Fitzwarren when it was discovered the family emeralds worth at least £100,000 were missing. Sir Aylmer himself died unexpectedly and there was some question about the manner of his death. That he had cirrhosis was known but his attending physician did not believe it was so advanced as to be terminal. He consulted the local coroner who decided to hold an inquest, which arrived at the conclusion of death by natural causes.
Once the emeralds were found to be truly gone, Treadgold began to wonder about Sir Aylmer’s death. Both of his siblings were in need of money and Sir Aylmer’s will left them a sizable sum. Sir Aylmer’s fiancé and his son born out of wedlock from an earlier alliance were also provided for in the will. Treadgold decided far too many people were better off without Sir Aylmer not to inquire further.
I liked this Treadgold investigation better than the first one I read. This one is a cohesive straightforward police procedural with a logical set of suspects identified almost from the start. None of the primary suspects are particularly nice people, and I could readily believe any of them committed murder. The actual killer turned out to be a surprise, in the best tradition of classic detection.
Foxgrove’s contempt for Treadgold’s use of psychology in analyzing the suspects and their motivations no doubt mirror’s Weymouth/Cobb’s experience in real life, as Cobb incorporated psychology into his medical studies. The skeptics didn’t stop Dr. Cobb just as they didn’t stop Treadgold.
Now that his books are available in affordable editions, I hope that Weymouth becomes more well known and more widely read than he has been.