The Home Secretary has invited an American financier George Oissel to a private dinner at the House of Commons to discuss the terms of a government loan. On leaving Oissel on his own a shot is heard and Oissel is found dead. Inspector Blackitt is brought in to investigate with various help including Robert West M.P. and Parliamnetary Private Secretary to the Home Secretary.
Set and written in 1930's England, with a writing style that is reflective of the period and including political details which is not surprising as Wilkinson was a M.P. at the time. Overall an enjoyable and interesting mystery.
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The thing that makes 'The Division Bell Mystery', a tale of a murder in the House Of Commons in the late 1920s, worth reading is that it was written by Ellen Wilkinson, one of the first women to be an MP.

Ellen Wilkinson knew the environment and the people she was writing about very well. She was elected as a Labour MP in 1924. She was Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Junior Health Minister from 1929-31 (the same role that the hero of the novel performs for the Home Secretary).

She wrote 'The Division Bell Mystery' after she lost her seat in 1931. She returned to Parliament in 1936, supported the Jarrow March and served as Minister of Education under Attlee until her death in 1947.

'The Division Bell Mystery' is a fairly average locked-room puzzle, with a plot that needs some serious suspension of disbelief and has a heavy dependence on the sexual charisma of young American heiress, whose impact on the men I found unfathomable.

What made this an interesting novel for me was the insight it provided to the Parliament of the day and the gentle wit it displayed, which I found to be far more damning than outrage would have been.

Wilkinson cast Robert West a young, up and coming, Tory MP on the lowest step of the ladder leading to Ministerial rank as the amateur detective tasked with unravelling how a guest of the Home Secretary, an American millionaire, is shot dead while alone in a private dining room in the House of Commons.

I've seen reviews of this book that have praised Ellen Wilkinson for picking a young Tory MP as the hero and refraining from scoring party political points. That's not a view I share. I think Ellen Wilkinson demonstrated very clearly how broken the House of Commons was and she also showed that our earnest young Tory had enough intelligence to know that something is out of kilter but was too much a product of the culture that dominates the House and causes the problem to be able to analyse it.

The House of Commons and the Cabinet that Wilkinson describes is an extension of the culture of Eton and Harrow. Politics is treated as a game where the aim is to make sure your side wins. You need to show your team captains that you're a Good Chap while avoiding getting into trouble with the prefects. It is so evident to everyone involved that protecting the power and reputation of your team and its leaders takes precedence over everything else that idea of pursuing and exposing the truth is an option only to be exercised if it's in the interest of your team to do so. This is what being a good chap means and Robert West is a Good Chap above all else, at least until he completely loses all perspective because an overtly sexual woman allows him to take her to lunch.

In this story, we see a known-to-be-stupid Home Secretary exceeding his brief and endorsing criminal behaviour, we see a narcissistic Prime Minister ensuring that the truth is buried in the interest of looking after the Party and his own career. We see the police and the press and a senior industrialist colluding to bring this about. And we see that, while there is some sense that the triggering incident showed regrettably bad form, the ensuing cover-up is seen as statesmanship.

I'm tempted to say that nothing has changed but that's not true. Things have gotten much worse. Our current crop of corrupt, venal, narcissistic old-Etonians no longer care about getting caught. They focus not on cover-ups but on making sure that getting caught has no consequences. As I read 'The Division Bell Mystery', I could see that even ninety years ago, we were on a path where our Prime Minister is a serial adulterer who has been fired twice from civilian jobs for lying and our Home Secretary was fired by the previous Prime Minister for trying cut a private deal with the Israelis and is such a notorious bully that the government had to make a sizeable out of court settlement to a very senior civil servant for how she treated him.

The charming thing about 'The Division Bell Mystery' is that it's not overtly didactic. The main character is a decent young man who believes Parliament is important and who wants to do the right thing. He's also the embodiment of how Party always comes first and why Parliament has become increasingly powerless in the face of Ministerial ambition.

I've picked out some quotes to demonstrate the way Ellen Wilkinson displays Rober West's thoughts.

Here's Robert reflecting on the changing status of England, impoverished after the First World War and the rising power of Financiers (Dalbeattie, an English Financier and Tory Party bigwig and Oissel, an American millionaire and Financier:

England, "which Robert through school and university had been trained to think was the centre of the universe, governing itself by its own elected Parliament. Dalbeatties and Oissels held the power now. To them and their like, whatever their nationality, England was but an incident, a set of statistics. The scope of their interests was international."

I think that analysis is in play again today with 'The Sovereign individual' ideology driving the Tory Party sponsors on a path that benefits only billionaires.

West senses that the game is changing and that he doesn't understand the new rules:

"Not for the first time did Robert West rage angrily against that public-school education which had given him no clue to this new world."

Then we get West's impression of the Tory old guard Backbenchers:

"West felt sorry for the old man, his fierce pride, and his patriotism that could only see a little island leading the world."

Finally, I offer this insight into the mentality of Robert West, a thoroughly decent up and coming Tory Party star. This is him preparing for a discussion on the murder he's investigating

"Robert felt that he must appear to be frank."

The strategy of appearing to be frank as a way of getting what you want reminded me of a common piece of advice from my days as a consultant: 'Sincerity is the most important thing. If you can fake that, the rest is easy.'

If you're looking for a strong Golden Age Mystery, this is not the book for you. If you're interesting in seeing the workings of the House in the 1920s from one of the first women MPs, a woman who was one of the leaders of the Jarrow March and who became one of Attlee's Ministers, you'll find a lot here to reflect on.
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This is the one mystery written by Ellen Wilkinson, one of the first women MPs (from 1924), a left-wing Labour Party member known from both her hair and her politics as "Red Ellen." It is set literally in the halls of Parliament, in a small private dining room where the Home Secretary is having dinner with an old friend, a very wealthy French-American who is negotiating a vitally important loan to the British government (the mystery was written in 1932, when the British economy, and hence the government, was very shaky). The division bell rings, signaling a vote in the House of Commons, the Home Secretary goes to vote, and while he is out of the room, a shot is fired and the guest is found dead. Forensic evidence eliminates suicide, but several witnesses were outside the door of the room --no-one came out and all the windows were solidly shut. It is quite a neat "locked room" mystery. To compound it, the same night the place where the wealthy man was staying is burgled, and a detective assigned to guard him is shot dead there. The police led by Inspector Blackitt investigate, and so does the Home Secretary's Parliamentary Private Secretary Robert West, (for those not into British politics, a PPS is a junior member of parliament assigned as assistant to a Cabinet minister). West is a handsome young man and attracted to both the American's grand-daughter and heiress Annette and a Labour MP, Grace Richards. The latter (though without the red hair) is based on Wilkinson herself, and at the traditional gathering of those involved, actually solves the method of the murder -- to which, incidentally, the title of the book is a clue. ( )

Ellen Wilkinson was a Member of Parliament and her insider knowledge informs The Division Bell Mystery, a mystery published in 1932 when the UK was reeling in the Great Depression. As it opens, the Home Minister is meeting with an old friend who has become a wealthy financier, softening him up, he hopes, to make a generous loan to the government. When he steps out to cast a vote, his friend is murdered though how is anybody’s guest. It’s not technically a locked-room mystery, but as it features a man sitting in a room alone where many witnesses hear the shot and see no one leave the room, it is basically a locked-room without the lock.

Complicating matters, the victim Oissel’s home is burgled and the Home Secretary’s favorite guard who had been on loan to Oissel is also murdered. Of course, Scotland Yard is on the case ruling out the much more convenient explanation of suicide. The Home Secretary sets his Parliamentary Private Secretary, another Member of Parliament, Robert West on the job of working with the Yard to solve the murder with the least embarrassment possible.

Robert West is an affable and competent young Member and he is diligent enough. Thankfully, he enlists enough friends and acquaintances who do most of the heavy lifting to the mystery is eventually solved. Along the way, he falls in love unwisely with a femme fatale of sorts who seems to delight in adding more fish to her string while obtusely ignoring a much better candidate who clearly must love him. Oh, if only there were a sequel!

I enjoyed Ellen Wilkonson’s acerbic bite which she inflicted on her fellow members of Parliament. I am not well-versed enough in that era’s parliamentary characters, but I have a feeling some of them will be recognizably caricatured. She must have despised pretension and time-wasting and it comes through in her book. If you are both interested in policy and frustrated by those who legislate it, you will snicker more than once.

The mystery is fair, fair enough that you might begin to think Robert West is a bit thick. He is certainly indiscreet, though perhaps if he were not he might never have informed smarter and wiser folks who helped solve the mystery. Some characters do not do much to further the plot or as red herrings to confound the mystery. One, in fact, seems a likely Watson if this had become a series, but as a single book, he seems superfluous. Of course, if such a series had been planned, I think West needed some skill-sharpening because he was better at collecting information than seeing the big picture to know what it means.

I enjoyed the parts about parliament and how it works or fails to work far more than the mystery, but that was mostly because Robert West was just not the sharpest pencil in the drawer of characters.

I received an e-galley of The Division Bell Mystery from the publisher through NetGalley.

The Division Bell Mystery at Poisoned Pen Press
Ellen Wilkinson at Wikipedia

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