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A Necessary End

Page history last edited by PBworks 15 years, 5 months ago

Gielgud, Val - A Necessary End (1969)

 

The Val Gielgud books seem to have have largely disappeared from sight, and -- from the evidence of this one -- it's not hard to see why. Admittedly this is a late production, published when Gielgud himself, like the century, was sixty-nine, and at the height of Symonds's attacks on conventional GAD fiction: but if one had to compile a manual of how not to write a detective story, this would be a ideal source-book.

 

The story is set on a freighter taking twelve passengers down the US West coast and through the Panama Canal. Among the passengers are Humphrey Clymping and Gregory Pellew, the principals of the Prinvest detective agency, based in London, who have been doing some work for the shipping line involved. It's meant to be a holiday -- Humphrey has brought his wife and mother along -- but of course they are approached by the Captain to look into some potential problems on board: and later when a passenger is killed they are asked to investigate. It looks as though the murderer has been apprehended, but doubts are cast; a confession is made; and Pellew finally extracts the truth via a hurried and unconvincing piece of gunplay at the very end. It's a thinnish plot, but it could have been spun into a satisfying story: as it is, one reaches the denouement with a nasty sense of having been duped and misled -- that is, if one can be bothered getting there at all.

 

For me there were at least five major failings in the book:

 

1) The lateness of the murder. We are 115 pages (more than halfway) into the book before we know that anyone has been killed. Most of the earlier part is dull and turns out to be irrelevant (mind you, so does most of the later part). A talented writer could have condensed this into 20 or 30 pages with no difficulty.

 

2) Homosexuality. Social issues aside, introducing homosexuality into a classic murder mystery is tantamount to announcing that all bets are off and anything can happen. If it was accurately depicted and sensibly handled then the mystery could have been salvaged, but Gielgud opts for stereotypes and puts us in a fantasy world where we can no longer trust our common-sense conclusions about what to expect. This is particularly annoying since Gielgud, who worked in the dramatic arts, must have known a good deal about real homosexuality and could have depicted it accurately if he had chosen to.

 

3) Drugs. Ditto for drugs, which seem to dominate the majority of British crime stories from the Sixties. Here they merely provide a red herring, but once again the stereotypes are dragged out and made to perform for the sake of the story.

 

4) Authorial omniscience. Much of the earlier part of the book is given over to background information about the passengers which is not known to the investigators. None of it has any bearing on the investigation, and one can only conclude that it is either there to fill space or because Gielgud thinks it's more interesting than actual detection. Neither conclusion gives one much confidence in the author's abilities.

 

5) Worst of all, one of the investigators holds back a vital fact from the other - and the reader - until almost the last chapter. This is simply unforgivable.

 

There are minor faults as well -- the author's old-maidish reticence about matters of sex and violence; the occasional intrusion of class snobbery; the pointless discussions between the investigators when neither has anything new to impart. Apart from all this, the book is simply mind-bogglingly dull and depressing. Did Gielgud always take himself this seriously? Or after fifteen books had he just lost interest? Most puzzling of all, why did anyone bother to buy it, and why did he go on to publish another four books?

 

A terrible story -- but seminal material for anyone interested in the decline of detective fiction.

 

Jon.

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