The House in Lordship Lane

the long version

Enter Bryan Devisher, over the side of the ketch in which Mordaunt was taking Mr. Julius Ricardo home to London on the summons of his old friend, Inspector Hanaud of the Paris Surete and the English ' idioms.' Exit, Devisher and Mordaunt. Enter Daniel Horbury. Exit Daniel Horbury-violently, with his throat slit in the garden room of the House in Lordship Lane, with Olivia, his wife, locked in her bedroom upstairs. Enter Septimus Crottle, patriarchal, tough old shipowner ; and the Crottle family, at a Sunday evening ' reading attended by Hanaud and Ricardo. Re-enter Mordaunt and Devisher-in Cairo. Exit Septimus Crottle, mysteriously ; re-enter Hanaud, hurriedly ; re-enter Septimus with all the toughness gone. But the house in Lordship Lane has never gone out of the story, and the master-craftsman brings us back to it at the end. And, when you read what really had happened in the garden room that night when Olivia drove her husband down to Lordship Lane, you remember the ejaculation of one of A. E. W. Mason's reviewers : ' What a work of art a thriller can be ! '