I consider myself very lucky to receive review copies of the British Library Crime Classics series. In these recent times, I'm having to read far more books digitally, so the BL ones, which arrive in real printed form, are even more welcome. Sometimes I read tham straight away, and sometimes they have to wait for their moment. Such was the case with this one, which came out about a year ago. First published in 1951, it's subtitled 'A Second World War Mystery', but in fact most of the action takes place in post-war London and France, though the murder case under investigation has its roots (deep ones) in events that happened during the war itself.
As Martin Edwards points out in his (as always) helpful introduction, the novel 'offers an unorthodox and highly enjoyable combination of courtroom drama and action thriller'. In the dock is a young French woman, Victoria Lamartine: she's on trial accused of the murder of Major Eric Thorsby, who was stabbed to death in the rather seedy hotel where she worked. As she was found in his bedroom with blood on her hands, and her fingerprints are on the knife that was used, her chances of acquittal seem to be slim. Her supposed motive was the fact that Thorsby, who worked with the French Resistance, as she did herself, was suspected of being the father of a child she subsequently gave birth to. Vicky hotly denies this to have been the case, claiming that her lover was Lieutenant Julian Wells, who was in hiding for some weeks at the farmhouse where she was based. Unfortunately Wells has disappeared without trace: efforts to find him by searching Nazi records of prisoners have failed, leading Vicky to hope he is still alive. Her case looks fairly desperate, but the veteran lawyer Noel Anthony Pontarlier Rumbold and barrister Hargest Macrea Q.C. believe it may be possible to save her if further information can be unearthed in France. So Rumbold's young son Nap is dispatched to the French Bureau de Lorraine in London to seek further information:
Seated behind a table, sole occupier of the room, was a girl. She looked up, saw Nap and smiled. It did not need the new copy of Le Figaro in her hand, or the elaborately simple beautifully conceived clothes.The face itself was sufficient to place her within ten square miles of the world's surface. Only one capital city could produce that deepest of dark brown hair with highlights of black, that white neck solidly angled to the shoulders, yet too well proportioned to to seem thick; Siamese cat's eyes of very light blue, which were so rarely found with such black hair.
This attractive character doesn't have much a role to play in future developments, but through his meeting with her Nap gets enough information to make it worth his while to go over to France to investigate further. Luckily his perfect French will enable him to visit the area where Vicky worked, and to make further enquiries, without being outed as an Englishman.
From here on, then, the action of the novel swings between an account of the proceedings at the Old Bailey (impeccably portrayed by Gilbert, who was himself a London lawyer) and Nap's sometimes life-threatening adventures in rural France. Mixing two such different genres could have been confusing, but it works extremely well. Both are exciting in their different ways - the barrister for the prosecution is a confident and wily chap, and for a long time it looks as if Vicky will be found guilty, while Nap's experiences in France bring him into contact with some extremely dodgy characters, leading among other things to violent fights, a stabbing, and Nap's immersion in a freezing, fast-moving river from which he despairs of being able to get out.
Like all the best novels of the period, the sights, sounds and smells of the era are vividly evoked. There's a host of minor characters both in London and France, who are mostly in involved in decidedly shady dealings of various kinds. I was very taken with a small-time crook by the name of Mousey Jones:
Mousey Jones was a small character who made a living by picking up the crumbs which lie round the wainscoting, and in the dark corners, of that big living-room of crime, the West End. His staple occupation was the insertion of lumps of putty into the return slots of public telephones - lumps he would later remove with a piece of wire bringing down sometimes as much as a shilling in coppers, a shilling which should by right have gone to previous pressers of Button B.
There are innumerable fascinating historical details like this throughout the novel, and I learned a lot about the condition of France soon after the end of the war, and the fact that many French people were able to make their homes in London at the time. In brief, though I've enjoyed almost all of the crime classics I've read, some more than others, obviously, this one is going very high up on the list.
