Forgotten Book - Turn the Light Out As You Go

Edgar Lustgarten was a Manchester-born barrister with a love of writing who became a famous criminologist and broadcaster. He is best remembered for introducing the Scotland Yard TV series first screened in the Fifties, which has made a welcome reappearance lately on the Talking Pictures TV channel. He wrote extensively on true crime, but he also dabbled occasionally in fiction.

By far his best known novel is A Case to Answer, aka One More Unfortunate, which was widelyu translated and filmed with Rex Harrison and Lili Palmer, but despite the success of that book, he only wrote a handful of novels over the next thirty years. The very last one, Turn The Light Out As You Go, was published in 1978, the year of his death, and it made little or no impact, partly no doubt because by that time Lustgarten was a name from the past.

It's an unusual novel, though, and one that I found very readable, if flawed. It's a short book which may (I don't know) have been based in some respects on a real life case. Certainly, the treatment of the sexual assault and murder of a young girl is presented in a style almost verging on the documentary.

The focus is on the couple who live next door to the dead girl's family. Joe and Elsie are a middle-aged couple whose marriage has become stale. Elsie wonders - without any very substantial grounds - whether Joe might have killed the little girl - and the suspicion proves corrosive. Joe's life embarks on a downward spiral, even though he becomes friendly with one of the policemen working on the case, who doesn't regard him as a likely suspect. Other people come into the frame before a shock ending that wasn't (to my mind) foreshadowed quite as much as it might have been. It's a curious book in several ways, and the portrayal of working class life seemed a bit dated to me, even by the standards of the late Seventies. Lustgarten was not, I think, first and foremost a creative writer. All the same, I found the story interesting as well as unorthodox.