I’m looking forward to reading this, I love the British Library Crime Classics series, and I’d thoroughly enjoyed Farjeon’s Mystery in White book which was great fun. This book sounds extremely intriguing too with the symbol of the letter Z being left at each murder scene!
I’m looking forward to reading this, I love the British Library Crime Classics series, and I’d thoroughly enjoyed Farjeon’s Mystery in White book which was great fun. This book sounds extremely intriguing too with the symbol of the letter Z being left at each murder scene!
The story begins with Richard Temperley arriving at a hotel smoke-room near Euston Station very early one morning, tired and fragile after a long journey and after suffering the snoring of a fellow passenger, he intends to spend a few hours asleep in an armchair until he can arrive at his sister’s house at a more respectable time. The snoring man from the train joins him in the smoke-room and there is also a beautiful woman in the room, however when Richard returns to the room after sorting out the safe placement of his luggage, he gradually begins to feel that something in the room is wrong and finally realises that the snoring man in the armchair is no longer snoring…because he has been shot dead! The police arrive and Richard is questioned by the inspector, he answers the questions quite readily but finds himself strangely reluctant to discuss the beautiful woman, who has now disappeared, or to consider that she could be involved at all in the murder. The inspector then finds at the murder scene ‘a small piece of enamelled metal, its colour was crimson and it was in the shape of the letter Z’! Oooh, this is a very entertaining book to read, and very fast-paced. I find it hard to put down, as it’s so exciting, I feel like I could just devour it in one sitting and I have to keep forcing myself to put the book down in order to restrain myself, although then I’m puzzling about it when I’m not reading it! It’s so enticing with the letter Z left at each murder scene.
The author’s comments within the story, such as arriving into a London train station in the early hours of a cold grey morning is ‘the depths of atmospheric depression’, and that London in the early morning is ‘like a woman surprised before she has had a chance to shake off the night and beautify herself for the day’, and I also like that the author seems to talk to us, saying ‘perhaps you know London’ and ‘the experience will try your faith’. And I also like the self-reflective way that Richard talks to himself and questions his feelings and motives, ‘he wondered why he paused’ and ‘he turned his eyes inwards and stared at himself’ and ‘why was he so tired, why so oppressed?’, it feels like we are getting to know him, being privy to his private thoughts and I also feel that with him being of a questioning nature (even though initially the questions are just regarding his own feelings) this bodes well for his detective skills. However, on the other side, we of course only then see things from his point of view, and this also makes the book feel quite claustrophobic too.
I think one of the fascinating draws with this book is because Richard knows nothing at all, he doesn’t even have a suspect to follow, all he has is the mysterious beautiful woman, Sylvia Wynne, who was at the first murder scene, and he seems to be following his instinct that she is trustworthy and also that she needs his protection. But she is concealing all she knows too. So really Richard knows absolutely nothing, who the murderer might be, why people have been murdered, or what Sylvia’s involvement is. He doesn’t really seem that interested either in the murderer or his victims, he is mostly just gallantly trying to help Sylvia and this seems all he is really interested in, which makes it feel like a different book from the usual whodunnit. It also, I think, has more the feel of a spy thriller than a whodunnit, and in fact the book reminds me a little of the The Thirty-Nine Steps book, with it not being from a policeman’s or detective’s point of view but just a member of the public (Richard Temperley in this book, and Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps) investigating things himself, dashing about here and there, reacting to events rather than methodically planning out the next course of action or investigating each murder scene for clues, believing instinctively in someone and acting on those instincts rather than keeping everyone in mind as a possible suspect and trying to discover more clues as to who the guilty person could be, the enthusiastic amateur pulled into the drama accidentally and becoming the lead. However he’s not really working in order to provide information to the police, he’s not against the police but he’s not working with them either.
Phew, I found it quite a complicated ending! The main criminal, ‘Z’, had had his arms chopped off and the letter Z burnt into his forehead 20 years earlier by a rival gang of criminals (a bit gruesome, the violence of this quite astonished me!), and had vowed to repay the leader of the rival gang for this, who was Sylvia’s grandfather. Z decided he was going to exact revenge by killing random people in areas that corresponded with the shape of a letter Z on the map of England, so this was London then Bristol then Lincoln (and I loved loved loved this idea of places being chosen because they fit with the shape of the letter Z on a map, that’s just so ingeniously obscure!), and then ending in Whitchurch where Sylvia’s grandfather lived and Z would then kill grandfather. Z had delivered this threat of revenge and death to grandfather, telling him it would all begin at 5am in Euston, so grandfather, now an invalid, was terrified and asked his granddaughter for help, telling her it was to begin in Euston at 5am hence why she was there at the scene of the first crime, however she knew nothing of grandfather’s past but was warned by him not to involve the police. Z then became aware of Sylvia as being the granddaughter of his enemy so decided that she would be a suitable person to kill at one of the places before Whitchurch, but Richard had successfully kept Sylvia safe. Z turned up at grandfather’s house and found Sylvia and Richard there but he was killed by the police before he could kill them. Grandfather had left the house earlier and had died in bad weather conditions. The book ends with Richard proposing marriage and a honeymoon in Australia to Sylvia, who accepts!
Wow, as I say, a bit overly complicated at the end, but thoroughly enjoyable and some really great ideas, especially the shape of the letter Z on the map of England, I loved that! I think I probably need to read the book again a bit more slowly in order to take everything in, as the tension was so gripping at times that I felt I just raced through it, but in a very enjoyable manner! I think Farjeon is now one of my new favourite authors and I’m very very keen to read more of his. Martin Edward’s introduction states that he has also written The Windmill Mystery, and Sinister Inn, which were both highly praised by Dorothy L Sayers (whose books I also love, so I’m taking that as a good recommendation!) but neither of these books seem to be easily available unfortunately. I think The Master Criminal was his first book so that would be interesting to read, and the books Thirteen Guests and Seven Dead I see have also been republished by British Library Crime Classics too. I have also luckily found a couple of his books from the Detective Ben the Tramp series in a charity shop so I snapped them up and am keen to read those, I have Ben Sees it Through, and Murderer’s Trail. I also love reading the introductions to these British Library Crime Classics book as the information they give is always so fascinating, and Martin Edwards (who wrote the introduction to this book) mentions in passing Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders, remarking that four years earlier Farjeon had produced his book ‘taken from the other end of the alphabet’, so that of course makes me keen to re-read The ABC Murders which is one of my favourite of Christie’s books. And Martin Edwards mentions Francis Durbridge’s stories featuring the detective Paul Temple and the cliff-hangers in these stories, and I’ve never heard of this author before so I am determined to read some of those too, I see Send For Paul Temple is the first in the series. And I was put in mind of John Buchan’s great tale The Thirty-Nine Steps when I was reading this, and I am long overdue a re-read of that wonderful book!
