Case with Ropes and Rings

I enjoyed two previous entries in this series, but found this tedious and the narrator/chronicler an infuriatingly stuck up prig whose method of telling the story focused far too much on what he (a willfully blind, narrow-minded, old-fashioned bigot) thinks and not enough on the story or his detective. I know he's “supposed” to be a fool, a kind of Nigel Bruce-style Watson, but there are limits. He's such an ass that he's insufferable, and the book suffers for it. I cannot recommend this, despite the fact that the solution is clever and unexpected.