Then there was Dornford Yates. I had read one book by him many years ago, on a train from Chennai to Delhi way back in 1997. This was The House that Berry built which was amongst the books that came to Lakmahal from the collection of my aunt Lakshmi. It was a murder mystery of sorts but more concerned with a house in the Pyrenees which Berry Pleydell was building. And though it was fun, I was not gripped, and thought no more of Dornford Yates until last year Penny, wife of Bruce Balden with whom I stayed in Berwick, to which he had retired, introduced me to Yates’ Chandos series.

Those are much more fun, and I finished one book in Berwick, and brought away two more, for she had spare copies. And having hugely enjoyed them I was looking forward to reading another one when I stayed with them this year on my way to the Shetlands. But it turned out that Penny had heaps of books for me, since she had bought a job lot of Yates’ novels for her sister, and had found that she already had several of them.

So I was given the rest and brought back more than half a dozen including four new Chandos books. And of course they were the first I started to read, except for The House of the Four Winds by the incomparable John Buchan. And unlike with the Buchan, which I read slowly and savoured, I read these quickly. Having hugely enjoyed the first, I started on a second, and finished that too very swiftly, at which point I decided I must ration them and only return to Richard Chandos towards the end of this month.

Blind Corner is the first Chandos book, and was so popular that it was several times reprinted as the various dust jackets indicate – and also recorded, by Alan Rickman, as also shown. It starts with him witnessing a murder when on his way back to England from France. Having stopped by the side of the road to have his lunch he heard an altercation, through a drain in the bank against which he was sitting. When he looked over it, he was just in time to see one man who had been called Ellis shoot the other, who had refused to share with him some source of wealth.

Chandos dodged behind the bank and when he looked again Ellis was gone, and he rushed to help the stricken man. But nothing could be done, though before he died he entrusted his dog to Chandos with the remark that he would find something in his collar that would pay for his keep.

Chandos found nothing, but when back in England his overcoat was taken in error by another man at his club, and the latter asked him, when returning it, whether he had had a dog collar in the right hand pocket. This was how he met Jonathan Mansel, who told him that the inscription on the collar was not a date, but a number, that of a member of the secret service in the War, ‘a crook but he was a very good man’. And between them, and George Hanbury the friend with whom Chandos was going to share a flat, who had also been sent down with him from Oxford, they find what was in the collar, a narrative explaining that there was a treasure hidden near a well that had been dug in an Austrian castle in the 18th century.