In the Mayor’s Parlour

Joseph Smith Fletcher sets this 1922 puzzle in Hathelsborough, a small northern English town where old money and older grudges quietly run the council. John Wallingford wins the mayoralty on a reform platform, and within months of taking the chain of office he is found stabbed in the mayor’s parlour with an old Spanish rapier, killed in a room no one was seen entering or leaving. His cousin Richard Brent, a London journalist with little patience for provincial secrecy, arrives to bury him and stays to name the murderer. What follows is a steady unpicking of municipal corruption, hidden financial interests, and the people who profited from keeping the town exactly as it was. Fletcher builds his case through documents and testimony rather than melodrama, and the guarded little borough itself becomes the chief suspect.