Reilly, Helen - The Line-Up (1934)

The Line-Up combines the police procedure of its classic predecessor McKee of Centre Street, with a mystery situation that recalls Mary Roberts Rinehart. It is an odd, but pleasant, mixture of two kinds of storytelling. As in a Rinehart novel, we have a murder mystery about an upper crust family, who live in a luxurious household. Also as in Rinehart, the family and a few friends are self-isolated from the rest of the world, protected by their money from socializing outside of a small circle of friends. Halfway through the novel, Reilly even introduces a nurse-sleuth who works undercover in the household and who reports to the police, like Rinehart's Miss Pinkerton.

Police procedure in The Line-Up concentrates on medical investigation, and trailing suspects. There is also a brief but interesting manhunt, which results in the title line-up. The police procedure is less intensively displayed here than in the book's predecessor McKee of Centre Street. The police also do a good deal of Rinehart-style snooping. The rich people have a lot of secrets, and the police ferret them out, in ways that suggest that the middle class police are spying on the rich. We are in the depths of the Depression here, and the contrast between the book's working class characters and the rich is pointed and extreme. The sheer greed of the well-to-do and their hangers-on is a sinister theme throughout.

We do get some of Reilly's best characterization of the various policemen on Inspector McKee's staff. And Reilly takes us to McKee's austere home. McKee has virtually no personal life - he is even shown working on Christmas Day, a huge anomaly in American life. One sentence reveals that McKee has a cat.

In general, both characterization and Reilly's trademark vivid descriptive writing, are among the book's strengths. They also make the book a slow read: one has to linger over the details of setting and atmosphere to get Reilly's full effect. Reilly tends to write in a way that engages all the senses, with sights, sounds and even smells all evoked.

Altered states of consciousness play a role again, as in McKee of Centre Street. In The Line-Up, there is a creepy sleep walking scene. And the first victim, a well-to-do society woman, gets poisoned by an overdose of an illegal prescription pain-killer to which she has become addicted. This out-of-control modern day problem was already present in 1934! The Line-Up shows us a society soaked in alcohol and dubious medications. It is not a pretty picture. Combined with Reilly's portrait of the money-hungry rich, it shows a country sinking into darkness.

The Line-Up has several different subplots, all boiling away. There is a continuous series of plot revelations throughout the book. These show some ingenuity. They are not at a masterpiece level, but they genuinely surprise - at least, they fooled me! The various subplots are not as well connected with each other as they should be. The identity of the killer is well-hidden. But it is not especially fairly clued, and the core murder mystery is not the best plotted part of the novel.

The best subplot follows a Mysterious Stranger who once showed up at the family home. Such strangers and their obscure errands are a frequent gambit in Mary Roberts Rinehart novels. In both Rinehart and The Line-Up, they serve the welcome function of adding an outsider and outside scenes, to the otherwise enclosed world of the family home. They also add to the amount of mystery in the tale. One has not just the murder, but the whole background and motives of the stranger to puzzle over. The "stranger subplot" in The Line-Up develops into a plot of Golden Age complexity, managing to dovetail together many seemingly unrelated clues and incidents, in a way beloved by true mystery fans.

Mike Grost