The Marrendon Mystery

*The Marrendon Mystery*, by J. S. Fletcher, consists of sixteen short stories of the kind which we classify as detective fiction. They are ingenious and well written, and in other ways rather better than the usual story of this type, for often the mystery turns out to have been all a misunderstanding and usually the ending is other than that which the hardened reader would expect. Mr. Fletcher, too, is no devotee of the processess of the law, nor yet of the amateur detective, for in only two of the stories is anyone brought to justice, and then we are given good, if conventional, reasons, other than their crimes. for disliking the criminals. The stories, as a rule, fall short of being exciting, but they are amusing and decidedly pleasant.
-- review, *The Spectator*, 24 January 1931.


*The Marrendon Mystery*, a collection of stories, was the only book Fletcher published under the illustrious Collins Crime Club banner. In his survey of the Crime Club, John Curran writes of the author and book that "the difficult art of writing short stories which really mystify and thrill the reader has no more brilliant exponent than J. S. Fletcher. [...] The diversity of his characters – railway booking clerks, poachers, fisher-folk, prison-warders, judges – [are] all drawn with the power and subtlety that reveals the hand of a master craftsman". (*The Hooded Gunman: An Illustrated History of the Collins Crime Club*, London: 2019; Hubin).
-- biblio.com