The last Basil Willing novel and a disappointing swansong from both McCloy and her detective. McCloy at 76 seems to have been feeling out of touch with the modern world, and the opinion swing against Freudian psychiatry in the 1970s has left Basil Willing without a modus operandum. He is shown here as a widower living in Boston, called in halfway through the book to consult with a troubled soldier returned from Vietnam.
The soldier's mother, Harriet Sutton, is a writer herself, and runs a boarding house for writers. A mysterious page which floats in through the window identifies one of the residents as the vitriolic anonymous critic Nemesis, and threatens murder; but which of the boarders is Nemesis, and which the murderer? A trained-to-kill Alsatian is implicated, and three deaths occur before the mystery is unravelled.
This is great material. The Lockridges could have turned it into a glorious farce; a John Dickson Carr treatment would have raised gooseflesh. McCloy, alas, can't do much with it at all. The narrative is clumsy and pedestrian; people erupt into the house and storm out again more or less at random; suspects and their dogs disappear implausibly quickly, and the tired old death-by-heart-attack motif is dragged out for another airing. People forget salient facts so they can remember them at dramatic moments, and important information is kept from the reader till the end. If McCloy had set out to write a typical 1980s mystery she couldn't have done much better, but coming from someone who once had a master's touch this is a sad let-down.
Jon.
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.