One Man’s Meat is the ninth title in the Flaxborough Chronicles by Colin Watson. The series of 12 gently sardonic and clever police procedurals featuring Detective Inspector Walter Purbright and Detective Sergeant Sidney Love in the prosperous market and port town of Flaxborough in East Anglia are consistently fine reads. Flaxborough is supposedly a fictionalized version of a town in Lincolnshire where Watson was a journalist. The book was published in the UK in 1977 by Methuen and under the title It Shouldn’t Happen to a Dog by Putnam in the US the same year.
As usual, the citizens of Flaxborough are up to no good. Biker and all-round no-goodnik Robert Digby Tring, known as Digger, is seen to discard his safety belt in a carnival ride and subsequently fall out during the gyrations of the capsule he was in. The Trings are a large clan at the lower end of the town socio-economic scale and known for their scofflaw tendencies. The owners of the carnival and the producers of the equipment are anxious to demonstrate that they were in no way at fault. The police are anxious to speak to the person he was with in the pod, but he has not come forward, leaving the police to flounder. The case does not look straightforward enough to write off as an accident but they don’t have evidence to the contrary. DI Purbright asks for a continuance of the inquest while his team continues to work.
In the meantime, David Harton, local managing director of a dog food company, wants a divorce but his wife Julia won’t give it to him without a payment of £20,000 (£119,000 in 2025, or about $163,000 US). David has no intention of letting loose of a penny. She’s approached by a gentleman with impeccable manners who offers to create a situation in which her husband might fall under suspicion by the police and would make him eager to pay her off. He won’t say how he knows she would like some assistance in exiting a marital arrangement. She assumes her father is helping her out of a marriage he never approved of and does not inquire further, she simply goes along with the plan.
The two story lines soon connect in a series of unlikely coincidences, beginning with the fact that Digger worked for Harton’s pet food company. Nearly all of the characters are involved in some kind of disreputable or illegal scheme, not always the same one their co-conspirators are pursuing. Miss Lucilla Teatime, a recurring con woman in these books, makes an appearance late in the story to help sort things out.
This is the most complicated plot I have found in the Flaxborough books. With Watson’s mordant characterization, it is an entertaining piece of crime fiction. For anyone who enjoys traditional mysteries with a side of humor.