Postgate, Raymond - The Ledger is Kept (1953)

Faced with a statement like this, how can a reviewer possibly disagree? The Ledger is Kept is dull, in a peculiarly English way, almost, I am tempted to say, in a peculiarly Penguin way; it encapsulates the grimness of two world wars and the dreary greyness of life in England between them and for a period after the Second. That doesn't have to make it dull -- interesting books have been written about dull times -- but the author's lassitude and disinterest are evident on almost every page. The only time Postgate perks up is when he is writing about food and wine -- a matter of obvious importance to the first editor of the Good Food Guide.

So what happens? Civil Servant Desmond Maverick travels north by train to a remote research station at Chellerton. He hopes there to see his old acquaintance Henry Proctor; but when he arrives there Proctor is dead, apparently of leukaemia. Accompanying Proctor on the latter part of the journey is a policeman called Holly, who is looking into evidence of secrets leaked to the Russians. Proctor is one of his suspects; is his death related to the case?

Maverick -- despite the name -- is dull. Holly is dull. A young researcher named Aldridge follows up the one clue in the case, and provides a welcome relief from dullness for a few pages. The espionage investigation focusses mainly on the location of some files, and so little happens that the only way to pad the story out to book length is to add a completely irrelevant central section of sixty pages describing Proctor's dull life.

I admit I read the book through: but I admit too that when I got to the end I wondered why I had bothered. There must be people who find this kind of dullness entertaining -- how else to explain the popularity of Le Carre? -- but I'm not one of them. Postgate's dismal authenticity would have been better off in a mainstream novel, where anyone looking for genuine entertainment could have avoided it. In a detective story it makes far too easy a target for the scorn of commentators like Chandler and Wilson.

Jon.