The clue of the silver key by Edgar Wallace

Also called “The silver key”

A good book, intriguing. Some characters are not nice at all :-p I mean,this cop Surefoot Smith can be rather rude when he wants too, but after all sometimes the situation calls for it, like : if a policeman was to tail a man and loses him instead, Smith is quite hard, can’t have him thinking it doesn’t matter. Even worse when a man forgets to tell him something important. He also loves beer, and can drink a bottle after another without feeling it.

There’s a nice female character: Mary Lane. There’s only one girl in the book, but she’s smart, and touch, a great character.

It was written in 1930, they do have telephones here. Not in every room, but they can find one whenever necessary.

It has many characters, although as the time goes, there’s fewer of them as they get murdered…

Let’s try to make sense of it: Mary is a young actress. Mike is her producer: he has a past of bankrupcy and insolvency, but now he has rich and eccentric Washington Wirth giving money to the theatre. 

Dick is Mary’s boyfriend, and also an inventor; he recently invented a new rifle that has great success.

Hervey Lyne is an old usurer, he is Dick’s uncle and by her father’s will, he’s also managing Mary’s money. He is quite unpleasant and rude to everyone. Binny, his servant, receives most of his temper, but doesn’t seem to care.

Leo Moran is a banker, hile Jerry is a young snob: h’s in need of money to repay Lyne, but gentlemen don’t work, he thinks. 

Jules is Jerry’s sort-of-friend, and Smith is the detective for Scotland Yard.

When Tickler, a small thief gets murdered at night, Smith is involved. Tickler was blackmailing the murderer. Never a smart move.

Lyne is going blind in his old age, and can see very little but won’t admit it to anyone. 

Dick’s rifle gets stolen, but he’s not too woried because it can’t be sold anymore, because he already filed for his patents.

Things reach another level when Lyne is found murdered. Binny took him to the park as always, on his wheelchair, and was reading to him as usual when Smith and Dick find him and realise the old man has been shot dead.

Moran has Mary sign some documents and then he disappears, raising suspicions on himself when it is found out that someone was stealing Lyne’s money.

After Smith talks to Mike about some bank paper in Mary’s possession, her house is searched. Nothing is stolen, someone was looking for that document, but Smith had it, so it was safe.

Mike is murdered too and left in the country, 

Leo Moran almost dies of gas poisoning, with a written page confessing everything… but he’s not the murderer, no. He was almost killed to blame it all on him. The real criminal is Binny. He lost his first job because was caught stealing, then he went to Amerca and got a name for himself there, as a thief and a murderer under a different name. Now back home, he got himself hired so that he could steal Lyne’s money. He was also Wirth with a wig, because he truly loved theatre and because if he managed to gather enough stars he could rob them all. This did not happen here.

He killed Lyne because he was suspecting him. He killed Tickler and Mike because they were blackmailing him. He searched Mary’s home. 

Jerry died too, but it was an accident. He had stolen the rifle for money, but he waited too long and after the patents, it was useless. So he tried to hide it in a hole in the ground, or something, but he didn’t know how this new type worked, and killed himself by accident.

Mary is the first to suspect Binny, but she has the natural desire to not look silly in case she’s wrong, so she doesn’t say anything about it while she investigates. Well, she told Smith she was doing it, though, so he had a man tailing her for protection.

She got it all right: Binny had started paying everyone in cash, and every month Lyne would sign the cheques that he would keep for himself. He got lots of money this way.

When Lyne asked for his bank manager, Binny sent Mike to him, to pretend to be Moran. But then Lyne heard Moran speaking on the radio, and realised the voice was different.

Lyne sent a message to Mary, to gather Moran and Smith and go to him, but it was too late.

They knew everything now, but they still couldn’t find Binny. He was hidden in a secret space in the house, and got away without anyone seeing him. He was really good at camouflaging himself, and become someone else.

Maybe he could have gotten away, but he got in his head that he wanted to do something big, something nobody had done before, he wanted to kill Smith before disappearing.

He kidnaps Smith pretending to be a woman. Smith didn’t recognise him, and was surprised. 

Now, since Smith is the hero of this story, he is not killed right away. He is taken to a house in the country, (and is seen speeding and ignoring a red light(, and then left bound in a room for a long time while he was digging the grave.

All this because he didn’t want anyone to discover what had happened, how and where. So he wanted to shoot Smith outside, and have him fall into his grave. All this took a lot of time.

Meanwhile, the police got alerted and started searching for him. 

Simth was saved. Binny tried again to escape, he even took Mary as a hostage, meeting her by chance on the road, but still he was found and captured. 

The day he’s hanged, is the day Smith drinks alcohol instead of just beer, to get drunk.

P.s. I love the fact that in this book, written in 1930, the clue of the broken watch is already old stuff and something not to be trusted, while on tv they kept doing this for years, I recently watched an old Columbo episode from season 3, so 1073 or 74, where the murderer tried this breaking the victim’s watch on purposes, and all other cops but Colombo bought it.