I love our summer game and its letters as much as the next man, and surely no less than my colleagues. I do not, however, repose much faith in its fiction. The short stories are fair to middling, and Conan Doyle, Wodehouse and Ian Peebles have contributed memorably, but my only previous novel-length experience, before the one under review, was of Maurice Moiseiwitsch's (1953). This penny dreadful, when last I saw it, was windmilling out of my bedroom window. It was resuscitated in 2006 by the misguided folks at Coldspring. Avoid it.