The Footsteps at the Lock
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This classic detective novel offers a clever, layered puzzle that rewards careful attention, blending Golden Age mystery with sharp social commentary on class and morality.
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Book Summary
When Derek Burtell vanishes from a canoe on the Thames, insurance detective Miles Bredon uncovers a web of deception between two bitter cousins. The investigation reveals a plot involving faked death, trick photography, and a twisted scheme for inheritance and revenge.
The story follows the rivalry between cousins Derek and Nigel Burtell, both Oxford students. Derek disappears during a canoe trip, and Nigel reports him missing. Miles Bredon of the Indescribable Insurance Company investigates, suspecting fraud due to a large life insurance policy about to expire. Bredon and his wife Angela analyze footprints, photographs, and alibis, gradually exposing Nigel's elaborate disguise as Mr. Quirk and his role in faking Derek's death. However, the truth proves more complex: Derek himself orchestrated the disappearance, using drugs and trickery to frame Nigel for murder. Derek's motive is revenge for a woman's death he blames on Nigel. Bredon reconstructs the events, revealing Derek's dual scheme to either have Nigel executed or split the inheritance. The novel concludes with Nigel recounting his moral struggle and Derek's capture, highlighting themes of justice, deception, and the corrupting influence of wealth.
Reading guide
Go deeper in The Footsteps at the Lock
Character guides, themes, chapter companions — plus Character Web, narrative arc, and theme heatmap teasers that unlock fully beside the text in BetterReads.
Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
- Setup
- Escalation
- Breaking point
This excerpt is the dramatic climax because it reveals the full psychological reversal: the narrator, previous…
Derek Burtell
The elder Burtell cousin, whose vanishing at Shipcote Lock turns a quiet river holiday into a case of suspected murder and a fifty-thousand-pound inheritance.
Nigel Burtell
The younger cousin who paddles away from the lock with a suspiciously precise alibi, leaving his cousin's canoe adrift and a trail of too-careful timing behind him.
Miles Bredon
A reluctant insurance detective who would rather play patience than solve crimes, yet whose instinct for human evasion makes him the one man the Indescribable sends when fifty thousand pounds are at stake.
Mr. Leyland
The police inspector who works the case alongside Bredon, patient with landladies and alert to the significance of which bed was slept in and which window opened onto an outhouse roof.
Angela
Bredon's wife, whose genius for collecting bores and extracting confidences turns a quiet riverside holiday into an intelligence-gathering operation she conducts with knitting needles and demure half-truths.
Mr. Erasmus Quirk
A small, stooping American member of the Detective Club who arrives at the Gudgeon to write up the Burtell mystery and finds in Angela Bredon an audience far more attentive than he suspects.
Inheritance and Moral Responsibility
The book opens with a philosophical meditation on the ethics of wills and property disposal, and the entire plot revolves around a contested inheritance that drives the cousins' conflict and the mystery.
Deception and Identity
Characters adopt false names, fake alibis, and elaborate disguises (such as Nigel posing as Mr. Quirk), while the central mystery hinges on whether Derek is alive or dead and who is really who.
Class and Aestheticism
The contrast between Derek's conventional, dissipated lifestyle and Nigel's affected aesthetic poses highlights tensions within the English upper classes, with Nigel's disdain for 'unforeign' things and his theatrical 'river-man' costume.
Nature versus Artifice
The idyllic Thames setting is described in lush, natural detail, while characters like Nigel prefer artificiality—he dislikes flowers outdoors, praises photography for never telling the truth, and dresses up for effect.
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