Forgotten Book - Five Minutes with a Stranger

This is my latest contribution to Patti Abbott's series about mysteries that deserve not to fall into oblivion.

Miles Tripp (1923-2001) began his crime writing career with the well-regarded Kilo Forty in 1963, but although his last novel, Deadly Ordeal was published as late as the year before his death, he never quite established the reputation that his early success suggested was likely.

One reason for this may have been that, for much of his life, writing took second place to his work as a lawyer employed by the Charity Commission. Another may be the sheer variety of his work: he veered from straightforward sixties thrillers, written as Michael Brett to sporadic entries in a series featuring private investigator John Samson. A number of the Samson books have considerable merit, but Five Minutes with a Stranger has lingered in my mind since I first read it not long after publication and a re-reading confirms it as my favourite of the Tripp novels that I have encountered.

It is a stunning and occasionally gruesome tour de force that comes as close as any novel by an English writer to the macabre sensationalism of Boileau and Narcejac. An un-named narrator, a young and naïve man, is conducting a study into the meaning of ‘charity’. Posing as an accident victim walking along the highways and byways, he seeks a Good Samaritan who will give him a lift. A beautiful woman stops for him; when she takes off her dark glasses, he realises that she is terribly disfigured. Soon he plunges into a nightmarish sequence of events and, although suspension of disbelief is required, the book is not only unsettling but also thought-provoking. This is a novel that deserves to be better known.