I've been meaning to take a look at the work of John and Emery Bonett (the writing name of a husband and wife team, John Coulson and Felicity Carter) for some time, but I've only just got around to their 1964 novel Better Dead. The story is set in the Costa Brava, an area the couple knew very well. My recent trip to Spain seemed like the right moment to give a try to this novel (known in the US as Better Off Dead). Overall, it's an odd one, a mixture of genuinely pleasing elements and deeply disappointing flaws.
Let's start with the positives. The fictional town of Rocadamor is nicely evoked (it's clear that the authors, who settled in Spain in later life, were disenchanted with life in England), the police detective - who is called Borges - is appealing, although off-stage for most of the novel, and the writing is agreeable, with prose a cut above the average. The way in which the story ends is also quite well done.
However, I had major reservations about the plot and structure, reservations closely connected with some aspects of the characterisation. The story begins with two Englishmen, a head teacher who is about to open a school for local children and the architect he has hired, discovering a body. The corpse belongs to a bar manager called Ferdy whom they both had reason to detest. I'm afraid that I found the way they reacted to this discovery to be utterly implausible.
We then have a very, very long flashback, in which we're introduced to a variety of local characters, mostly English, all of whom seem to have possible motives to kill Ferdy. They are an interesting bunch, but unfortunately, I found some of those motives unconvincing. In a way the trouble stems from the fact that the characters are quite well-drawn. But if one creates intelligent people who behave in a consistently stupid way, that behaviour needs to be convincing. Of course intelligent people behave foolishly very often in the real world, but in fiction there does need to be a degree of believability - and I felt the Bonetts failed to supply this. I couldn't really get my head around why the culprit behaved as they did. As a result, in my opinion the plot doesn't really work. A shame, because this is a book that I wanted to like more than I did. Frustrating.
