The Inconsistent Villains

"Here is a mystery story that is extremely hard to leave. The plot is a new one and the book is well written. Temple-Ellis has created some unusually breath-taking situations. The reader is dashed from one startling cry in the middle of the night to numerals written in blood on windows. There will always be, as long as the human race survives, something weirdly fascinating about the unexpected. And Temple-Ellis's Inconsistent Villains is full of the unexpected. The story opens in a little Essex village in England. Captain Montrose Arbuthnot and his friend, Sir Edmund King, have rented a place called Desolation Cottage for a few weeks. Arbuthnot was avoiding a case he did not wish to accept in London. Overnight this poky little village becomes the scene of terrible crime. First one man is murdered and then another. A factory on the fringe of the village becomes a place of mystery and danger. Arbuthnot, because he is a detective, and King, because his curiosity has got the better of him, decide to run down the perpetrators of the outrages. The way they do this makes The Inconsistent Villains a corking good mystery melodrama." (1929 review)

The Inconsistent Villains was awarded the first prize in the $2,500 Dutton-Methuen detective mystery contest, judged by A. A. Milne, H. C. Bailey, and Ronald Knox.

N. A. Temple-Ellis was the pseudonym for Neville Aldridge Holdaway (1894-1954). The Inconsistent Villains was the first of ten mysteries, several of which featured Montrose Arbuthnot as detective.