Murder by Matchlight

Purchase link 

Frustrated that his girlfriend was ill and unable to meet him for dinner, Bruce Mallaig takes himself on a stroll through Regent's Park. London is shrouded in darkness because of the blackout, but Bruce finds a bench and sits down to enjoy the darkness and the quiet. In Murder by Matchlight by E.C.R. Lorac, we have a classic "locked room" mystery in the style of the golden age of crime fiction.

Mallaig watches as a stranger approaches the bridge near where he is sitting and ducks underneath it. Within seconds another figure approaches the bridge and calls out "Anyone about?" The new person stops in the middle of the bridge and lights a cigarette. Mallaig is sure there is an assignation about to take place, but he wonders what the man under the bridge is planning.

When the man on the bridge strikes another match to light a second cigarette, Mallaig sees a ghastly face in the matchlight looming over the man. The matchlight goes out and then Bruce hears a a dull thud an the sound of a body falling down.

Shocked into action, Mallaig shines his flashlight down on the ground and sees a man prone, but he

also sees the man under the bridge trying to climb back down. Yelling for the police, Mallaig hears footsteps racing towards him as he struggles with the second man, Stanley Claydon.

A doctor arrives on the scene and pronounces the man on the bridge dead to the shock of everyone present. No one heard anyone else approach or flee from the scene.

As Clayton explains why he was in the park that evening, he tells the police about overhearing a telephone conversation by someone named Tim talking to a doctor in a threatening manner. When Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Macdonald hears the unusual story of a murder with two witnesses, but neither able to identify the killer, he is intrigued, especially when Mallaig claims the person he saw in the matchlight was very much taller than the victim.

When the victim is identified as John Ward, MacDonald soon learns about the charming Irishman from the other residents of the rooming house where he lived. He also learns John Ward was among the dead when a German bomb landed on a shelter, long before this John Ward was killed.

Although Murder by Matchlight was written many decades ago, it is being republished to celebrate the British Library Crime Classics. It is an atmospheric puzzler with an unusual solution. Very entertaining.