john_amend_all

This was a British Library crime reprint that I purchased on a recent visit. It's apparently "considered to be one of [the author's] finest works" according to the blurb on the back, and got a glowing review from Dorothy L. Sayers on initial publication.

My reaction, having read it, was that there's a reason Sayers, and Christie, and Freeman Wills Crofts were bestsellers, whereas Anthony Gilbert wasn't.

To outline the plot: Tony Keith (the first-person narrator), and his old school friend Jeremy Freyne, go to stay at a country house, where dark goings-on are suspected. The Secret Service have a man there, one Arthur Dennis, who's investigating a blackmail plot. Arthur and Jeremy both want to marry Hilary, the daughter of the household, who's about to turn 21. So does the rascally Ralph Feltham. One night there's a fancy-dress ball, at which Ralph is expected but doesn't show up. The next morning his body is fished out of a pond on the estate.

It takes Tony and Jeremy a quarter of the book just to get to the estate, and the body is found about halfway through. Then, by the time they've got through the coroner's inquest, they've only got about 40 pages left (in a 220-page book) to do their investigating. They're working independently of the local police, so they don't know if the clues they're finding are significant or not. Eventually, Tony does find the crucial clue (yay!) and the mystery is resolved.

The overall impression I got was that this was a short story's worth of plot spread across a novel's worth of text. The author does go to some trouble to give the characters backstories, and at least some of the backstories turn out to be relevant; but given that she went to the trouble of developing the characters, I'd have liked to seen more done with them.

On the plus side, the author seems less disparaging of the physiognomy of dark blue eyes than Josephine Tey.