The above three are all risks run by someone writing about another country, but they are known problems. From the 1930s onwards British authors tried writing hard-boiled thrillers set in a USA that they had never visited, leading to lines of dialogue such as that allegedly penned by Peter Cheyney - "Get out of the car and put the gat on the bonnet", which should have been something like "Get out of the car and put the gat on the hood". There should now be no excuse for someone to make Cheyney's type of mistake, if only through having the manuscript copy-edited.

It's worth looking at Todd's novel because it seems to some-up a number of problems, some of which may not the author's fault.

However, as I go on to examine, other areas, such as

2. The Text

Let us look closely at the text, referring to the British paperback edition (Headline 1997). (Hodder Headline is the descendant of the Hodder and Stoughton of the 1930s who used to publish Sapper, Edgar Wallace, and Baroness Orczy). The story revolves around the death of a wealthy land owner, killed by a shotgun blast, while out riding through the Warwickshire countryside about his home.

2.1. Spelling

Todd uses the American spelling for ordinary objects (most of these differences, I think, are Noah Webster's), a spelling that his protagonist and the other characters would not have used.

As the page numbers indicate these occur throughout the novel, they are the sort of differences which have been known since the days when Sherlock Holmes identified a letter writer's nationality from his spelling of "plow". There is a possible explanation for them in that third person narrator: since Todd is an American there is no reason why his authorial voice should not use American spellings. However, there are no American references in the story (unlike John Dickson Carr, say, who had an American Jeff Rawle narrating his early stories) and hence no reason in the text why the American spellings should be used. And as the Holmes example suggests, spelling often provides clues, so that spelling which is not standard distracts from the narrative and ought to be avoided.

(Perhaps Todd's American publishers felt that his American readers would be unduly troubled by British spellings and so used them, but it seems inexcusable for a British publisher not to correct them).

Some of Todd's spellings are just idiosyncratic, though. Throughout the novel Todd spells inquest with a capital I - "Inquest". Why?

2.2 Terminology

2.3 Floors and Stories

I have seen a claim that Todd gets his floor numbering wrong: that is, a British house has a ground floor, a first floor and a second floor, where an American house has a first floor on the ground, and a second and third floor above ground (so that Todd said second floor when he meant first above ground), but his description of the staircase in the big house on page 21 reads correctly to me, nor did floor numbering bother me elsewhere.

3. Custom and Practice.

There are overlaps between most of the headings used here. There are arguments to be put forward to say that "What is lunch?" should appear under this heading, rather than under the heading of terminology, and below I list certain anachronistic use of of technical terms. Generally speaking, though, a detective story should be realistic and errors in practice weaken the story. These seem to be some of Todd's weaknesses in describing police work in 1919:

3.1 Police Powers

3.2 Police Cars

Inspector Ian Rutledge is a gentleman, and drives from London to Warwick in his own motorcar. This is partly because he is claustrophobic as a result of his experiences in the Great War, but also because he can afford to run a car of his own. I can think of no other police officer of the time who is described as having his own car: in fact, they are always grateful to their rich friends (Lord Peter Wimsey, for instance) who can give them lifts. In many stories written between the Wars inspectors borrow bicycles from local constables as they ride off into local countryside. The inspector thinks that in a train he will be "jammed in with half a dozen other people" (page 5), but, of course, he could have bribed the guard to lock the door to his compartment (stories suggest this was quite common), or he could have taken a compartment to himself. Either of these is more likely than his owning a motorcar of his own in 1919.

3.3 War Wounds

Rutledge is just getting over the war, and has conversations with a dead colleague from the trenches in which he (Rutledge) sometimes speaks his part aloud.

The whole plot revolves around the death of a local landlord and the suspicion falling on a local war hero. The man who is closest to an eye-witness is now a broken-down wreck as a result of his own war experiences. The sergeant explains why he will not act: "he's shell-shocked, sir, doesn't know where he is half the time, thinks he's still at the Front, hears voices, that kind of thing. Lost his nerve on the Somme and went to pieces. Lack of moral fiber, that's what it was. It seems a shame for a fine man like the Captain to be under suspicion of murder on the evidence of an acknowledged coward" (page 15).

Rutledge is thus in the ironic position of not being able to show attention to a prime witness due to the similarity of their conditions, and thus, for Todd's purpose, providing a source of narrative conflict.

However, no matter what a police sergeant in 1919 may have felt about a shell-shocked ex-serviceman, the exposition put into his mouth is hopelessly wrong. There would have been little condemnatory connection made between shell-shock and cowardice. If the man had shown cowardice he would have been court-martialled, but he had not been court-martialled so he not been regarded as a coward.

What Todd does next is drop a piece of extra-ordinary anachronism: the term "lack of moral fibre". This was used in the Second World War; it was condemnatory; it was the only condition under which men could leave active service in the Royal Air Force. Nevertheless, it was not used to described a physical or mental medical illness. There was a difference between being invalided out, and expulsion for lack of moral fibre. It seems more than strange that Todd should have an ordinary police officer using it to refer to an infantryman in the First World War; it seems wrong.

3.4 Coffee

Rutledge is served coffee for breakfast, without asking, and has it frequently at other times. In a country pub, in 1919, this is most unlikely. There was no instant coffee. The real thing would have been rare, and percolators to make it rarer still.

3.5 Pub Rooms

Rutledge and everybody else seems to use the public bar, and the other rooms downstairs in the pub at random, completely ignoring the then strict social differentiation between their clientele.

4. Logical Consistency

On Pages 30-31 the butler comments on the changes wrought by the war: "Before the war there were twelve of us, including footmen." (The butler is only talking about indoor staff). This reduction has not made too much difference, though, because when Rutledge came up the drive he noticed "a wide sweep of lawn mown to crisp perfection, the flower beds sharply edged and the drive smoothly raked. One glance and you could tell that not only had pride gone into the upkeep of this house, but unabashed love as well." (Page 20).

The family (ie the upper-class residents) would not have done the gardening. Where did the gardeners come from? They would have gone away to the War. And as history showed many of them did not come back. They did not come, anyway, to be gardeners again.

5. Conclusion

Ending with the general problem of consistency is a point worth making because with the notes on anachronism above, or the problems with the use of the post office, it begins to make clear some things common to Todd's work. Any one statement looks good in the sentence in which it is made, but the reader who tries to reconcile one statement with another (sometimes on the same page, sometimes further away) will find too often that the two are irreconcilable (you can't have a well-kept property on the one-hand, and a servant problem on the other, for instance).

This failure of reconciliation has a number of causes, most of which could have been rectified by the author or his editor. Yet others of these problems could have been avoided by better reading and preparation on the author's part. Since Todd's plot has some features in common with, say The Red House Mystery or "The Invisible Man", (and they are both well known detective stories) is it not reasonable to suppose that he familiarise himself with the literature, and then avoid the problems which have been pointed out in those earlier stories?

Equally, could Todd not have improved his social history just a little? Chandler wrote an itemised analysis of Milne's novel in "The Simple Art of Murder" - it would have been so easy to take note of what he said, and avoid those errors again.(Pessimists may not be surprised that a book has been supervised by a publisher's editor who is not aware of the books in the genre he or she is editing these days, and so cannot help the author).

For all the negative tone of this analysis, I read the denouement to the story with surprise, and found it satisfactorily disturbing. It is not as if Todd has written a failure as a detective story. Rather he seems to have failed to construct a reasonable novel, and that detracts from his success. I call this article "This is not America", partly to indicate the trans-Atlantic relationship of the author and his subject, but also to point out that there are books to which my criticism is inappropriate (works of intentional fictionality such as Franz Kafka's Amerika, for instance). However, as Chandler's essay points out, detective stories are based on realism, and therefore the points I make are relevant to A Test of Wills.

At the beginning I wrote that this problem is not attributable to the authors of any one country. It could face any author trying to exploit a foreign milieu or alien point-of-view. If this analysis is to have any benefit it should draw the attention of prospective authors to the areas which threaten to undermine their work. It could be a check-list to something better and that is how I put it out.