Skelton's Guide To Blazing Corpses

There’s something very appealing about this series of period whodunnits by David Stafford, of which this is Book 3. The stories are peppered with eccentric characters and prose that’s vaguely Wodehousian, so they are great fun to read. And the plots are intriguing – not least because they are all based on real-life crimes and court cases from the 1930s.

There’s nothing dark or noir about David Stafford’s ‘Skelton’s Guide’ series of whodunnits. Put simply, they are just light, easy-to-read stories that are well-written and thoroughly enjoyable. The Skelton of the titles is Arthur Skelton, a barrister practicing in London but originally from Leeds, who’s described in Blazing Corpses as being “39-years-old, pebble-glasses, face like a pantomime horse”. Despite those seeming disadvantages, he’s happily married to a rather glamorous Swedish girl called Mila, has two children and, because of his courtroom successes, has been given the sobriquet ‘the man who refuses to lose’.

Blazing Corpses begins with the discovery of a car on fire in a country lane on Guy Fawkes Night, 1930. Once the blaze has been extinguished everyone is horrified to find a body in the driver’s seat, charred beyond recognition. The owner of the car, Harold Musgrave, was a vacuum cleaner salesman, bankrupt and facing charges of bigamy, so it’s assumed this was a suicide… until the post-mortem reveals he had died from a massive blow to the back of the head before the fire had been lit. Without any real evidence, the police immediately arrest a local handyman called Prosser and Skelton takes the case for his defence. A little while later it’s revealed that the body in car isn’t Musgrave at all.

The car fire and murder are the focus of the novel but other cases that Skelton is working on are scattered through the story too. There’s his defence of the ‘Medical Electrician’, a man suspected of being responsible for the unexpected death of one of his patients; a hit-and-run case involving a drunken university student; a trademark case involving “Ivory White” lavatories, and more. It’s pretty jolly stuff but that’s not to say this isn’t a proper crime novel, because the car fire and murder aren’t straightforward. It’s definitely an okay mystery and one that – as I’ve explained – is based on a real-life murder that happened in the 1930s.

My verdict
Before turning to crime fiction, David Stafford enjoyed a very successful career writing dramas, comedies and documentaries for radio and television, collaborating with people like Alexei Sayle and Benjamin Zephaniah. It helps to explain the lightness of touch in his writing and plots which just zip along. But the sad thing is that as I was writing this blog, I discovered Stafford died at the end of last year, so Blazing Corpses will be the last Skelton novel.

I guess these novels fall into the genre of ‘Cosy Crime’ but I’m not sure that’s a perfect fit, not least because the cases the stories are based on were real-life events. Yes, they’ve been fictionalised for the novels, but the foundations are real which adds a bit extra – for me anyway.

I’ve now read all three Skelton books – this one, plus Skeltons’ Guide to Domestic Poisons and Skeltons Guide to Suitcase Murders – and I’ve enjoyed each one enormously. They are easy to read, full of humour and engaging characters, and I’m really sad there will be no more of them. Each of the three gets 4 Stars from me.
Review by: Cornish Eskimo