It was a dark and stormy night . . .
P. D. James
THE ACT OF ROGER MURGATROYD by Gilbert Adair Faber, £10.99, pp. 286 ISBN 057122637X It is hardly surprising if from time to time a contemporary novelist should attempt to write a pastiche of Agatha Christie, if only in the hope of solving the mystery of her egregious popular success and its longevity. Year after year this gentlyreared Edwardian lady produced stories of sometimes fiendish ingenuity which were seized on eagerly by a world readership with the avidity of druggies awaiting their annual fix; murder without disturbing horror, loss without pain and class-consciousness without guilt. While prestigious prize-winning novels drop out of print, Christie’s paperbacks are still ranged on bookstore shelves. Gilbert Adair sets out his intention clearly, to pay homage both to the Golden Age of the English murder mystery and to its most brilliant practitioner.
So how far has he succeeded? The title is more reminiscent of a short story by Dickens than a Christie title, but the setting is totally in character. We are in ffolkes Manor on the edge of Dartmoor on Boxing Day morning, 1935. Colonel Roger ffolkes and his wife have assembled a house party for the festive season, including Evadne Mount, a crime novelist with nine novels and three plays to her credit, her actress friend, Cora Rutherford, the local doctor and his wife, the parson and his wife, and Colonel ffolkes’s longstanding factotum, Farrar. Their comfortable if boring Christmas Eve was disturbed when Colonel ffolkes’s daughter, Selina, arrived with her boyfriend, the unfortunately named Donald Duckworth, bringing with them an uninvited and unwelcome guest, Raymond Gentry. Gentry — whose very choice of car, a Hispano-Suiza, is deplored by his fellow guests as vulgarly ostentatious — is an unmitigated cad and potential blackmailer who is clearly destined not to leave ffolkes Manor alive.
In the first chapter we meet the house party, assembled in the wood-panelled drawing-room and still in their dressinggowns at quarter past seven. Upstairs in the attic lies the body of Raymond Gentry with a bullet through his heart, ‘his sickly, effeminate features warped out of shape by a grimace of indescribable horror’. The door is locked with the key on the inside and the Colonel has had to break it down to gain entrance. A blizzard is, of course, raging outside, bringing down the telephone wires and making it impossible to contact the police. It is Chitty the butler, the sole voice of calm in a maelstrom of emotion, who suggests that they should call on the help of the retired Chief Inspector Trubshawe in his cottage some six or seven miles distant. Trubshawe is collected in the doctor’s old crock, a car which he claims could stand up to the worst weather and, after a cursory examination of the scene of crime, takes charge. Had he examined the attic with more care and searched for the gun, he would undoubtedly have solved the crime within minutes but, inhibited by his retired status, he contents himself with inviting the co operation of all the house party in explaining why each of them had a motive for wishing Gentry dead. This they obligingly do and at some length, although prudence would have suggested that they keep their mouths shut, await the arrival of the local force and as soon as possible send for their solicitors.
Adair has taken trouble with his research. The narrative is larded with contemporary references to books, art, films and the stage, and Evadne Mount, who takes the lead in recounting events and ultimately is the one who solves the crime, makes frequent reference to her own novels, the plots of which challenge the ingenuity of her rival, Mrs Christie. The conventions of the age are observed. The Colonel does let slip a ‘damn’, but it is printed as ‘D**n’. The servants, with the exception of Chitty, are regarded as too unimportant to be suspects, and there is ‘an eruption of nasal wailing from the butter-fingered kitchen-maid, adenoidal Addie’, whose unseemly tendency to weep is sharply put an end to by Mrs Varley, the cook.
There is, too, the racism which in the Thirties was certainly not confined to detective fiction and is the more shocking to contemporary sensibilities because it is taken for granted. As Evadne Mount says, ‘Raymond was wrong, simply hopelessly wrong.’ He was dressed inappropriately for a country visit and ‘anyone could see there was more than a touch of the tarbrush’ in his tan. And it wasn’t only the tarbrush. His very name was suspect. ‘It’s almost as though he had such a craving to belong to the gentry that he thought he could make it happen simply by renaming himself .... Or else he rather fancied the consonance of Gentry and Gentile. Gentry — Gentile? You follow me?’ Yes, Evadne, we follow you all right.
The solution propounded by Evadne certainly ranks eight out of ten for ingenuity and provides that combination of cunning and incredibility which characterises most Christie novels. And if Adair occasionally misses the authentic voice, we must remember that the murder-fabricating ladies of the Thirties had an advantage: they believed in what they were doing. There is one clue which I certainly shouldn’t have missed. The murderer could undoubtedly have killed the victim more simply and more safely than by the method chosen, but if murderers in Christieland acted with uncomplicated prudence instead of concocting bizarre methods of despatching their victims, where would be the fun either for writer or reader?
There are one or two incongruities, but they don’t detract from the entertainment. The expression ‘Mayhem Parva’ was coined by Colin Watson in Snobbery with Violence as late as 1971. The lesbian affair between Evadne and Cora would not have featured in the detective novels of the Thirties, although a lesbian relationship is strongly hinted at in Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers. Sexual passion in the Golden Age might provide a motive for murder, but its manifestation was always strictly orthodox. And in 1935, blizzard or no blizzard, the vicar and his wife, together with the more socially conforming members of the house party, would have squeezed into the doctor’s old crock and been in church on Christmas morning.
© P. D. James, 2006
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