Knox came from a prominent line of Anglican clergy, and would probably have risen all the way to bishop or archbishop in that religion if he hadn’t converted to Catholicism, but he was named protonotary apostolic by Pope Pius XII, an honorary rank which allowed Knox to use the title “Monsignor/Msgr.” Knox was a biblical and classical scholar, a friend of G. K. Chesterton’s, and a member of the Detection Club alongside Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Baroness Orczy, et al. He presented “Broadcast at the Barricades,” a satire from BBC Radio depicting a Bolshevik revolution in London, which caused widespread panic when people mistook it for the real thing, and inspired Orson Welles’s famous “War of the Worlds” broadcast. Knox also originated the “Sherlockian game” of writing mock-erudite essays that treat Holmes, Watson, etc as historical rather than fictional figures.

His “Ten Commandments of Crime,” which laid out the rules of Golden Age “fair play” mysteries, are widely quoted. In the days before ebooks, I found it impossible to find any fiction he’d written by himself, as opposed to The Floating Admiral and the other tedious “chain-written” collaborations that the Detection Club put out in its heyday. Recently, I had the chance to snag his entire Miles Bredon series as a $0.99 ebook, and the standalone mystery the Viaduct Murder for I think the same amount.

The short verdict is that as a mystery writer, Knox was strictly a “puzzle” man.

He generally had very weird, seemingly inexplicable scenarios going on, which he did a good job of explaining. But he was not good at the kind of surreal, almost gothic atmosphere that Margery Allingham and John Dickson Carr used to “sell” their weird and seemingly inexplicable scenarios. Like Dorothy Sayers, he had a certain affection for situations that look like cold-blooded murder but turn out to be…something else, which means, among other things, that you can’t assume that a thing that looks like suicide in his books is really murder.

He had a decent line in comedic patter, especially in the scenes between insurance investigator Miles Bredon and his wife Angela. For my part, I liked the Bredons better than Tommy and Tuppence (who predate the Bredons) and not quite as well as Nick and Nora Charles (who postdate the Bredons). But generally, Knox was pretty meh at psychology. Nothing completely implausible, like the Georgette Heyer mystery that requires a wimpy idiot to suddenly grow a spine and a brain in order to kill for the things that matter to him. But also nothing like the “holy cow, you’re right, Agatha, he is totally capable of that!” reveals that you find in certain Agatha Christie novels. My recurring response to the motive component of Knox’s novels was: “Eh. If you say so, Father.” Probably his worst failing as a fiction writer was a tendency to over-describe, without being any good at evoking a particular time and place.

In terms of the prejudices of his time, he’s pretty much par for the course, except for his peculiar and virulent dislike of English-speakers from outside the British Isles, which is much harsher than the “haha, look at those weirdos over there” attitude that Agatha Christie tends to strike. Americans, Canadians, (white) South Africans all appear in an extremely unfavorable light in Knox’s novels, and I think there’s an unsympathetic Australian in there somewhere as well, or at least an unsympathetic person who’s spent time in Australia. I liked the insurance investigator novels better than the standalone, partly because in the series, the mystery always turns out to be a bizarre, faintly absurd series of unfortunate events that do sound like the kind of thing an insurance investigator would stumble into. Here’s a quick rundown:

–The Viaduct Murder: published in 1925, the same year as The Layton Court Mystery by Anthony Berkeley Cox. The Cox novel introduced the smarmy, comically overconfident amateur sleuth Roger Sheringham, and Viaduct Murder has a similar vibe of “haha, watch this buffoon trip over his own deductions.” But whereas Sheringham does manage to bumble his way to an actual win in his first outing, his counterpart in the Viaduct Murder is an annoying, unfunny twerp who is consistently 100% wrong. His investigation is complicated by occasional inputs and counterpoints by the other three, equally annoying, twerps in the sleuth’s golfing foursome. There’s an official, obvious and boring solution that the main characters do nothing much to unveil, and possibly a hidden “alternate” solution that one of the golfing foursome vaguely hints towards at the end. I didn’t care enough to read through the whole novel again and see if the alternate solution held up, even though it starred my preferred suspect. There’s a vague Catholic motif in the background, with some references to the English persecutions of same, but it’s not an aggressively religious book.

–The Three Taps: First of the Miles Bredon novels, published in 1927, about seven years after Whose Body by Dorothy Sayers, which introduced the world to Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey and his friend Freddy Arbuthnot. I can’t help wondering if Sayers borrowed Knox’s middle name for Freddy’s surname, and Knox in turn borrowed Wimsey’s middle name for Miles’s surname. This one is a good introduction to the “series of unfortunate events” approach that Knox tends to take for Bredon’s investigations. I found it fairly interesting, but you will learn way, way more about the logistics of indoor gaslights than you really want to know. There are some Catholic characters floating around in the background, and the one Catholic bishop who shows up seems like a good egg, but again, this isn’t what you’d call a preachy book. Don’t assume you know where Knox is going with the dead man’s “shady” secretary, either.

–The Footsteps at the Lock: Second Miles Bredon novel. I think the puzzle aspect of this one was my favorite of the series, although the psychology of the villain holds up even less well than usual. If you’re not already familiar with Three Men in a Boat or Great Canal Journeys, you may end up learning way more than you really want to know about boating along the Oxford in the late 1920s.

–The Body in the Silo: the third Miles Bredon novel makes a weak stab at being an old-fashioned manor house murder mystery, but doesn’t develop the suspects in as much depth as one expects from a manor house murder mystery. A Knox mystery is generally based on the idea that howdunnit will give you who, and this one is typical: we’re given a dead body found in a deeply WTFrak situation and the rest of the story is the Bredons picking away at the details until the whole picture emerges. There’s a certain irony to the way things play out that I enjoyed, but I’m not sure the solution holds together logistically. This is also the one where the narrator (not sure if it’s meant to be Bredon POV) decides to trash African-American spirituals for a sentence or two. It’s just really weird, coming as it does in a book where the white South African guy is supposed to be a major jerk, and one of the things the author cites as proofs is of this is passing references to him being a raging bigot against black South Africans. It almost looks like Knox’s real beef with the spirituals is that they come from America?

–Still Dead: I feel like this is the one Miles Bredon novel that fires on all cylinders. The Scottish setting is pretty well-done, the characters’ motives pretty consistently make sense, and what actually happened feels less logistically improbable than some of the other books.

–Double Cross Purposes: Also set in Scotland, but not as well-executed as the previous one. Convoluted but amusing treasure hunt scenario. One of the suspects spends time in brownface, leading to the local minister making some patronizing remarks about what kind of supernatural entity the superstitious Scottish folk would mistake a person of color for (hint: not the good kind of supernatural entity.) I’ve seen some fairly negative comments about this aspect of the novel, but I will say in Knox’s defense that neither the minister nor the suspect are meant to be particularly sympathetic people, and I didn’t get the sense the author was endorsing any of this, or even agreeing that the Scots were quite that superstitious.

Verdict: Give The Three Taps or Footsteps at the Lock a shot if you’re curious about the author, and then proceed through whichever of the rest of the Miles Bredon books sound acceptable to you. Whichever ones you decide to read, try to read them in order of publication. Knox wasn’t one to spoil his past mysteries, but a character from Three Taps reappears in Double Cross Purposes, and a character from Footsteps at the Lock is referenced in one of the later books, can’t remember which. Skip The Viaduct Murder unless you’re really desperate.