This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
The Middle of Things is a twenty-nine-chapter London mystery by J. S. Fletcher, published in 1922. On a fine, frosty November night, Richard Viner — thirty, comfortably off, a collector of books rather than a frequenter of the world — takes his habitual walk before bed and finds a man dying in a narrow walled passage behind Markendale Square in Bayswater: white linen, and a bloodstain spreading across it. The dead man proves to be a Mr. Ashton, and the case that grows out of that pavement — "Who Was Mr. Ashton?", "The Ring and the Knife" — reaches far past Bayswater. A young man who ran from the passage, Langton Hyde, is hunted through England; news arrives from Melbourne and Arcadia, then from Paris and Marseilles; a parish register is turned over; and a Japanese cabinet yields the papers that reach back to the Ellingham motto and to the present holder of that title.
At the middle of it all stands the question of who is truly Lord Marketstoke. A man appears in London calling himself by that name, acting through the solicitors Methley and Woodlesford of the Edgware Road, and the case goes up for magisterial examination with counsel on both sides — Millington Bywater for the claimant, Perkwite of the Middle Temple for the other side, Mr. Carless and Mr. Pawle for the family. Viner's aunt, Miss Bethia Penkridge, who had spent the opening chapter insisting that truth is stranger than fiction, becomes the sharpest pair of eyes in the house; Drillford of the police follows the physical trail; and the woman known as Miss Avice Wickham, living quietly under Mrs. Killenhall's care, turns out to be the person everything hinges on. The ending is not a trial but a resignation: the man who holds the title insists on giving it up to his cousin, the Countess of Ellingham, and two young people who were thrown together by a murder walk out of the same room holding hands.
