Walling, RAJ - The Dinner Party at Bardolph's

That Dinner at Bardolph's (1927 - 1928) is more a thriller than a detective novel, unlike Walling's later pure Golden Age detective novels. There is a murder mystery plot, but it takes up only a small proportion of the novel. The crime and its investigation largely take place off stage, thus further reducing its importance in the book. Much of the novel is instead taken up by the efforts of the hero to help various suspects evade the police and murderous villains, hiding them in various remote locations. We get a detailed look a high speed driving in Britain and the Continent, sometimes reaching up to speeds of forty miles per hour. Both the road scenes and the love interest in this book are charmingly done. The book is pleasantly written, but suffers from triviality. It seems destined to be placed in the "charming but minor" category.

Like later works of Walling, this one shows the influence of EC Bentley. As in Bentley, the tone throughout is suave and genteel, with many literary quotations in the dialogue. Walling shares Bentley's genuine refinement. Also Bentley like: the treatment of servants as genuine characters, and not as stick figures. The hero's lower class chauffeur, Fenstock, shows fantastic resourcefulness in his maneuvering of suspects all over Britain. He comes across as more genuinely inventive than anyone else in the book; a case can be made out that he is the genuine hero of the novel, although he is denied the love interest given the upper class hero of the book. Walling also gives a Bentley like critique of the stock market, and the sinister manipulators who control it. The hero is the only one in the story who is opposed to manipulating the market using inside information. The other characters all denounce him as a dangerous leftist for this, something he hotly denies. Today, of course, insider trading is seen as a serious felony, and people who do it are sent to prison for many years. Apparently in 1920's Britain, it was still legal and approved by most business people.

Mike Grost