Mr Pottermack's Oversight is a mystery novel by R. Austin Freeman. Freeman invented the inverted mystery in which the crime is first shown, often from the PoV of the criminal, and then the process of detection is shown. Mr Pottermack's Oversight is of this type.
The novel starts with a convict (Jeff Brandon) on the run after escaping from a prison work gang, near the sea in England. He finds a heap of clothes apparently left by someone who walked into the water, some hours earlier as shown by the state of the tide. He takes off his prison outfit, and puts on the abandoned clothes, and make his way into the country away from the sea. Searchers find the clothes and assume he tried to swim out to a passing ship or barge. Some weeks later Brandon reads a newspaper account of an inquest in which a drowned nude man is identified as Jeff Brandon, an escaped convict. Brandon, under a false name, gets a job on a tramp steamer which takes him to the US.
The scene shifts forward some 14 or 15 years. Brandon is blackmailed by a man who knew him before his conviction. Hew is now living under the name of Marcus Pottermack, and is well-off enough to own a house with no need to work. Brandon kills the blackmailer in a fight, and the body flies into a disused well. But Brandon (Pottermack) must fake footprints so that the blackmailer's track does not stop at his garden gate.
During the course of the investigation it is mentions that Brandon had been convicted of forgery some 15 years previously, and has escaped from prison after "about a year" of his 5-year sentence. He was in his early 20s at the time of his conviction, it is said.
We also learn that in the US Brandon worked as an accountant and then was in business as an investor, earning and saving enough to retire and return to England with capitol to live on for the rest of his life.
The novel has a copyright date of 1930, and the major "present day" part of the action could be roughly 1930 from the descriptions, no specific historical events are mentioned. It is said that the manager of a small bank branch had a salary of 600 pounds per year, if that helps in fixing the date.
But if the later scenes are set in 1930, the escape 14 or 15 years before would have been in 1915 or 16, right in the middle of WWI. Coast areas would have been much more heavily patrolled, and tramp steamers from the US, if present at all, would have been much more careful about taking on unskilled seamen. For the matter of that, Brandon would have been quite likely to have been in the military, not still working in a bank. Moreover, a young man with no family in the US might well have been drafted after the US entered WWI. There is no mention of the possibility, or even of the war.
Thus it seems to me that the action must be set somewhat earlier, so that the escape takes place well before WWI. But that still leaves the issue of Brandon possibly being drafted while in the US. Is any setting possible that avoids these issues? Is there any evidence in the test itself which perhaps I have missed?
