DEATH AT DARTMOOR

Talk about dedication. When Lord Charles Sheridan’s American wife Kate wants to research locations for the latest novel she’s setting on the Devon moors, her devoted husband ensconces her in unlovely Princetown, in the shadow of Dartmoor prison, so that he can indulge his fondness for amateur criminology while she soaks up atmosphere. Since Kate’s old friend Patsy Marsden, intrepid photographer and traveler, is also on hand, along with their acquaintance Arthur Conan Doyle, who’s researching his own tale of the moors, the sojourn promises pleasures both scenic and social—as well as an opportunity for Charles to bend prison officials’ ears about the breakthrough science of fingerprint analysis and to interview Prisoner 351, Dr. Samuel Spencer, a Dartmoor guest ever since midway through his trial for killing his wife, when he unaccountably changed his plea to guilty. What comes as a bonus is unscheduled mystery: Soon after Spencer escapes from Dartmoor, local squire Sir Edgar Duncan is found murdered—a shocking development foreshadowed during a séance Lady Rosalind Duncan had arranged with medium Nigel Westcott. While Doyle, more successful as romantic lead than detective, chases false clues, Lord Charles, who’s just “like Sherlock Holmes . . . only smarter,” uses a convenient eyewitness to the killing to bring the guilty to book.

A fantasia on themes from The Hound of the Baskervilles whose determined focus on the Sheridans (Death at Epsom Downs, not reviewed, etc.) shows an altogether more lighthearted side of the moors than Doyle ever revealed.