Murder in the Maze

After both Roger and Neville Shandon are felled in Whistlefield's famous hedge maze by curare-tipped darts Sir Clinton [Driffield] arrives to restore order at this fractious country estate. Sir Clinton's performance as a criminal investigator is dazzlingly acute and the novel boasts several bravura scenes all centering on the sinister hedge maze of death. Surely Murder in the Maze is one of the very finest country house mysteries produced by a British detective novelist in the 1920s. . . . No less a literary figure than T. S. Eliot praised Murder in the Maze in The Criterion for its plot construction . . . and its narrative liveliness . . . deeming it 'a really first-rate detective story.' . . . [I]n his 1946 critical essay 'The Grandest Game in the World' the great locked room detective author John Dickson Carr echoed Eliot's assessment of the novel's virtuoso setting writing: 'These 1920s . . . thronged with sheer brains. What would be one of the best possible settings for violent death? J. J. Connington found the answer with Murder in the Maze.' (From the Introduction.)