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The Chestermarke Instinct (1921) is a thirty-one-chapter classic detective novel by the British crime writer J. S. Fletcher. When John Horbury, manager of the old-established Chestermarke & Company bank in the Yorkshire town of Scarnham, disappears after paying a heavy cheque to Frederick Hollis, a visiting manufacturer, the bank's partners — Gabriel Chestermarke and his nephew Joseph — disclaim all liability, and the young bank clerk Neale sets out with the local police superintendent Polke and the Scotland Yard detective Starmidge to unravel the mystery. The trail runs from the bank's gardens and the abandoned lead mine of Ellersdeane Hollow to the London banking house of Vanderkiste, Mullineau & Company and the offices of Godwin Markham, a city money-lender in Conduit Street; the verdict on the murdered Frederick Hollis hangs on a forged cheque for ten thousand pounds, and the key to the whole affair is the double identity of Gabriel Chestermarke himself — the "Chestermarke instinct" of the title, the banker's instinct that drives every apparent accident toward the truth of his own crime. A midnight explosion in the workshop behind the bank destroys Gabriel and maims Joseph; Horbury, rescued from his prison in Joseph's garden, tells the full story from his sick-bed, and Neale — whose loyalty to Betty Fosdyke, the missing manager's niece, never wavers — sees justice done. Fletcher, one of the most prolific crime novelists of the Edwardian and Georgian era, builds the book on banks, forged documents, gardens, mines and double identities — the machinery of the golden-age detective story.
