As three men with a dog travel along the Thames in a boat faithfully following the route taken by the characters of “Three Men in a Boat” by Jerome K. Jerome, Sergeant Cribb follows them. They are his chief suspects in the murder of a tramp. Accompanied by Constable Thackeray, Constable Hardy and a young principal witness, Miss Harriet Shaw, he travels by boat, by cab, by steamer and by train, only to find out that his investigation as not going to be as simple as he expected. He’ll need Miss Shaw’s assistance to succeed this time – she is shrewd enough to be a plain-clothes detective herself, only in those Victorian days nobody in England heard about policewomen. But she gives the Sergeant a very useful tip.
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This is my first encounter with this English author’s work – today at the English Speaking Club (hosted in a library in Saratov) I picked two books by him, and started with this particular one. The book, as Wikipedia tells me, was written in 1975, but the events take place approximately 90 years earlier. It must be hard to write with such confidence about the past, I daresay – involves a lot of historical research to get the background right.
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