The Mystery of the Mud Flats is sold as a classic British crime novel. Its detective, Austin Voodgt, is called the “Sherlock of the Sea”. It was first published in 1913 as WO2 and has been reissued in HarperCollins’ Detective Club Crime Classics series.
The narrator is James Carthew-West, who owns a boat that is in bad shape, much like his finances. Then his luck seems to turn, he and his crew are offered a job ferrying cargo. But something about the business doesn’t add up. The cargo seems useless, and the trips don’t make any profit. So who is paying for them, and why?
The premise is interesting, and it promised an exciting adventure at sea. The book also introduced me to a whole new vocabulary of life on boat and on the water. It starts off well.
Where it lost me
After that strong start, it fell short of my expectations.
The dialogue is hard to follow. The author writes some characters with a heavy accent spelled out on the page, which made several conversations a struggle to read.
The mystery is weak. The final revelation isn’t really a crime, and the villain isn’t much of a villain. By the end, I found our heroes, James and Austin, more greedy and manipulative than the man they were chasing.
Austin Voodgt is no Sherlock Holmes. He’s unlike any other detective I’ve read. He wants money, and he’s ready to blackmail or manipulate people to get it. In some conversations, I couldn’t tell if he was being rude or joking. It’s a very different vibe from Holmes and Watson.
The German subplot
The book was written in 1913, when Britain was anxious about Germany’s growing military power, and a whole genre of “invasion” and spy novels grew out of that fear. The most famous example is The Riddle of the Sands (1903), which also involves sailing small boats along a coast where Germany may be up to something. The Mystery of the Mud Flats is part of that tradition, and the German company in the story reflects the worries of its time.
Knowing this context made the subplot more interesting to me, but on the page it never felt like a real threat.
The Romance
Skip to the verdict if you don’t want to know how the romance ends.
There’s a romance between James and Pamela Brand, and it didn’t convince me at all. Pamela is written as a strong woman. She supports women’s suffrage, a big issue in 1913, and she believes in equality between men and women. She’s a feminist for her era and very forward-thinking. Near the end, there’s a conversation where she seems to choose herself, and I loved it.
But then the author throws all of that away. Suddenly she’s begging James to marry her and chasing after him. They rarely meet or even talk, so where did this deep love come from? Maybe I’m judging a classic by modern standards, which isn’t completely fair. But still…
Verdict
The Mystery of the Mud Flats has a great setting and an intriguing set-up, but the weak mystery, the hard-to-like heroes and the unconvincing romance let it down. By the end, I still felt that our supposed protagonists were the real villains.
Rating: 2.5 Muse Points, for an old-fashioned mystery.
If you want classic British crime that has aged better, have a look at my guide to The Golden Age of British Crime Fiction.
