Forgotten Book - The Case of the Four Friends

J. C. Masterman was a man of many parts. An eminent figure who rose to become Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, Sir John Cecil Masterman was an academic and also a key figure in British espionage during the war, overseeing the organisation of double agents. As if that wasn't enough, he wrote a notable detective novel, An Oxford Tragedy; it wasn't the very first Oxford-based crime story, but its success set the ball rolling and of course it has had innumerable successors.

It was on the strength of that book, above all, that he was elected to membership of the Detection Club. Many moons ago, I wrote a short article about Masterman for CADS, which was later adapted for the website Tangled Web UK, in its hey-day the go-to place on the internet for information about crime fiction. I'm sorry to see that the site has now vanished, but Geoff Lees and his family did a great service for many writers, publicising their books on the site over many years. Thank goodness CADS is still going strong.

The novel featured a Viennese professor, Ernest Brendel, and after the war, no doubt much encouraged by his admirers, Masterman revived Brendel, and brought him back to Oxford for another detective story. This was The Case of the Four Friends, published in 1957, almost a quarter of a century after its predecessor.

The story has a very clever premise, a sort of refined version of the "whowasdunin". Brendel tells a story about four people ("friends" is stretching it a bit) which is an exercise in pre-detection: can he prevent a murder from taking place? And the reader has to figure out both the prospective murderer and the prospective victim.

Unfortunately, the story is lacking in action and there's no attempt to make use of the Oxford setting - the story might have been recounted anywhere. I think the idea could have been livened up, and it's a pity Masterman didn't do this. Instead, we get a rather dry, cerebral tale. But for its inherent ingenuity, if not its execution, it earns high marks

Morag Joss and The Night Following

Morag Joss is by no means a prolific author. The Night Following is only her sixth book since the first appeared back in 1996. I’ve never met her at any writer’s event, and I don’t know a great deal about her – but one thing I do know is that she is a novelist of genuine distinction, currently working in the borderland between what, in this age of categories, might be described as ‘psychological suspense’ and ‘literary fiction’.

I thought her award-winning Half Broken Things was superb, right up there with the best of Barbara Vine; it was also very well done on television. The Night Following was short-listed for an Edgar, and is a fine novel, although to describe it as a crime novel is pushing the definition of crime fiction to the limit. But that doesn’t really matter – what does matter is that it’s a haunting and impressive piece of work.

Briefly, the catalyst for a strange series of events is the unnamed narrator’s discovery that her husband is having an affair. In a state of shock, she drives off and kills an elderly female cyclist. Rather than giving herself up, she becomes obsessed by the dead woman’s husband, Arthur, and when she starts to hang around his home, he deludes himself that his wife has returned from the grave. Interwoven into the unsettling narrative, seen from the perspective of both the main characters, is an unpublished manuscript written by the dead woman, which tells a disturbing tale of the past. Gradually, the narrator assumes the role of Arthur’s wife….

I reviewed the book for Tangled Web UK and explained that, for all my admiration of it, I thought there were some flaws, not least the implausibility of the narrator’s behaviour. But it often happens, I think, that when an author takes chances, as Joss does here, not all of them come off – it’s a sign of ambition, and often a sign of a very good book. And The Night Following certainly is a very good book.

Saturday Selection

Encouraged by the response to the first Saturday Selection, I've decided to continue with the concept as a means of highlighting recent or forthcoming titles. So here is news of a couple of very interesting new short story collections.

I’m delighted that Tangled Web UK, one of my favourite online crime resources, has asked me to review a new book of short stories written by the late Michael Gilbert, one of my all-time writing heroes. Gilbert was a prolific short story writer, and several posthumous collections have appeared, but A Pity about the Girl and other stories, published by Robert Hale, is expected to be the last. (A previous collection, The Mathematics of Murder, is very hard to find and I've been looking for a copy for ages - so if anyone has a copy they'd be willing to lend or let go, do get in touch.)

John Cooper, an expert on classic detective fiction, furnishes a short but informative introduction to this book, outlining Gilbert’s achievements in the field of short fiction. This collection features characters familiar to Gilbert fans, including the lawyer Henry Bohun, and includes both a ghost story and a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. I intend to devour it imminently and I hope the review will appear soon.

Killer Year (sub-title, Stories to die for) is a gathering of short thriller stories edited by Lee Child and published by Mira. These are new stories by writers whose names are (with a few notable exceptions such as Ken Bruen and Sean Chercover) unfamiliar to me, but they look promising and this is another book that I’m looking forward to reading.