The Whole Queer Business of Wisteria Lodge

Abstract

‘Wisteria Lodge’, published in the Strand in 1908 and collected in His Last Bow (1917), is in two parts. The first, entitled ‘The Singular Experience of Mr John Scott Eccles’, covers the client’s narrative of a most unusual dinner at Wisteria Lodge, a house near Oxshott in Surrey; the dinner is given by a Mr Garcia, who is found murdered the following morning. The second part, ‘The Tiger of San Pedro’, tells the story of the investigation of Garcia’s murder. ‘Wisteria Lodge’ turns out to be a story of revolution and tyranny: Don Murillo, the former kleptocratic dictator of a South American country, has escaped with his loot and his life, adopted a new identity in Surrey, but is being pursued by a syndicate of his surviving victims led by Garcia.