Fountain inn

de Victor Canning

This is a mixture of simple love story and detective story. The social observation and love story elements are rather good. The crime and detection are totally implausible. The reviewer in The Times of 20 May 1939 characterises this as a "reluctance to cause pain". Fountain Inn, somewhere among the Inns of Court, houses several enterprises, including a group of architects for which George Crane works, the Society for Progresive Rehabilitation run by the sinister Mr. Tomms, General Factotums run by Ben and Helen Brown, and W. Rage who employs Grace Kirkstall as typist. When the story opens, W. Rage has just disappeared leaving a bankrupt business and Grace is out of a job. The Browns take her on as a secretary in their shaky business which is partly a form of Universal Aunts and partly a detective agency. They are asked to investigate their downstairs neighbours, The Society for Progresive Rehabilitation, which has been willed a large inheritance and may have used unfair means to get it. Meanwhile Grace is falling for the architect George Crane who, incidentally, is designing buildings for the same wicked Society.