Find The Mind Of Mr Mosley Imagined By John Buxton Hilton Rendered As File

felicitous example of the English rural police novel which has come into its own as a subspecies of British detective fiction This little bonbon verges on a spoof of the type set as it is in the town of Upper Crudshaw and displaying such characters as Horace Kettle a boilerman Wilfred Weskitt a wimpish parson and Millicent Millicheap an out of control middle aged poet Inspector Mosley is called to investigate the suicide of Reuben Tunicliffe ayear old Upper Crudshawian who committed suicide in his privy Mosley an unorthodox practitioner constantly at odds with his superiors suspects blackmail but the traps he lays to get the evidence all backfire Somehow the intelligence services of three countries are drawn in and it looks like Mosley's career will come to an abrupt end Greenwood pseudonym of the late John Buxton Hilton who wrote four previous Inspector Mosley novels beguiles us yet againI've read this series off and on for year It was written in the style of between the wars or just after WWII I vascillate sometimes I don't like the books because they're so convoluted and so British that I can hardly understand the plot At other times the author's sly wit and the picture painted of a bygone era captivate me I do think I'll collect the entire series and read them from beginning to end When Reuben Tunnicliffe of Upper Crudshaw commits suicide the imperturbable Mosley is unwilling to leave the case in the hands of his nemesis Chief Inspector Marsters And once again in his unorthodox way Mosley triumphs over a deluge of hilarious obstacles Mrs Mosley has won a vacation trip to Spain But before Mosley leaves his turf he starts a few hares to see if he can find out why an inoffensive elderly man withdrew all his savings from the bank and then killed himself Unfortunately the rather outre sense of humor of the vicar's wife tangles Mosley's plans bringing into play the funniest set of spies to invade an English village since Colin Watson's Hopjoy Was Here A joke about the subject of this bookCopied from Reddit A cowboy walks into a bar and orders a drink When the bartender delivers it the cowboy looks around and notices the bar is completely deserted other than himself and the bartenderWhere is everybody This place is usually packed this time of day the cowboy saysThe bartender replies They've gone to the hangingHanging Who are they hangingBrown Paper Pete says the bartenderWhat kind of name is that Why do they call him Brown Paper Pete the cowboy asksWell says the bartender he wears a brown paper hat brown paper shirt brown paper trousers and brown paper shoesWeird guy says the cowboy What are they hanging him forRustling says the bartenderSheep are being rustled from the area around Upper Crudshaw in the North of England in the present day The police keep staking out likely areas but the crimes continueDuring this period Reuben Tunnicliffe a seventy four year old man in Upper

Crudshaw hangs himself There seems to be no doubt that he did commit suicide but why The police officer assigned to the case is Inspector Jack Mosley the main character in this series by John Buxton Hilton writing under the pseudonym John Greenwood The Mind of Mr Mosley is the fifth out of six books in the series this book and the final one were published after Hilton's deathMosley believes that Tunnicliffe had been being blackmailed and had run out of funds before his suicide Mosley comes up with an extremely complex scheme to expose the blackmailer which seems to involve half the population of Upper Crudshaw However this does not go according to plan to say the leastA solicitors' clerk is involuntarily involved in phone sex A vicar and his wife are suspected of prostitution The local poetess is thought to be involved in international espionage a suspicion that brings foreign agents to Upper Crudshaw She is also suspected of having stolen a pair of Wellington boots but that has nothing to do with MosleyAnd other things are happening in Upper Crudshaw as well The dead man's widow loses five hundred pounds to a well known conman Her daughter an unhappy composer with a history of attraction to unsuitable men meets a very suitable police officer Mosley's superior officers grow increasingly unhappy themselves A subordinate and friend of Mosley continues his romance with a social worker as he tries to solve the problem of the disappearing sheep And the sheep continue to disappearMost of these issues resolve satisfactorily even if in odd ways I find some of the solutions rather less appropriate than I think the author does The matter of the blackmailer is given less importance than I feel it deserves And while almost all of the characters in the book including most of the criminals are better off at the end of the book Upper Crudshaw's resident poet already having to suffer under the unfortunate name Millicent Millicheap has nothing good happen The identity of the rustler not revealed definitely until the next to the last page is not a surpriseBut The Mind of Mr Mosley is consistently entertaining fun This is hardly the first book about rural British policing but it is surely one of the most amusing John Buxton Hilton was a British crime writer After his war service in the army he became an Inspector of schools before retiring into take up full time writingHe wrote the Superintendent Simon Kenworthy series and the Inspector Thomas Brunt series as well as the Inspector Mosley series under the pseudonym John Greenwood Hilton died in Norwich.