The Footsteps at the Lock

At first sight the case looks simple enough to private investigator Miles Bredon. Two cousins on a boat trip on the River Thames: Derek with a 50,000 reason for surviving the next two months until he inherits a legacy; Nigel with a 50,000 reason for getting rid of him and inheriting the money himself.

When Derek disappears, Nigel naturally falls under suspicion – not least because he has a train of alibis that is almost too perfect. But where is the body? And if this is not murder, whose is the photograph of a body slumped in a boat, and who left the wet footprints at the lock?

Author Biography

It was Ronald Knox, who, as a pioneer of Golden Age detective fiction, codified the rules of the genre in his ‘Ten Commandments of Detection’, which stipulated, among other rules, that ‘No Chinaman must figure in the story’, and ‘Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable’. He was a Sherlock Holmes aficionado, writing a satirical essay that was read by Arthur Conan Doyle himself, and is credited with creating the notion of ‘Sherlockian studies’, which treats Sherlock Holmes as a real-life character. Educated at Eton and Oxford, Knox was ordained as priest in the Church of England but later entered the Roman Catholic Church. He completed the first Roman Catholic translation of the Bible into English for more than 350 years, and wrote detective stories in order to supplement the modest stipend of his Oxford Chaplaincy.