Rhode, John - The Telephone Call (1948)

Review by Nick Fuller

2/5

This is the famous reconstruction of the Wallace case, in which Mrs. Julia Wallace was found dead by her husband, who had been called away on a wild-goose chase by a telephone call purporting to be from a client — Wallace’s lack of alibi automatically making him the prime suspect.

That is the story behind this book—the murder of Mrs. Julia Ridgewell, the solution to the mystery given, not by Dr. Priestley, who appears one-third of the way through and contributes nothing but padding, but by Jimmy Waghorn, keen and intelligent as usual, following some first-class physical clues, the case resting on circumstantial evidence. “Isn't it odd how the investigation of this case hangs upon what appears to be the merest trifles?” This despite the attempts of the incompetent police surgeon to muck up the possibly vital clue of the scullery sink; and the attempts of the biased policeman to turn every clue into a case against the husband, following Inspector Lestrade’s noble philosophy. The lower middle-class background is well touched in, with a grimmer atmosphere than usual with Rhode, whose usual atmosphere of optimistic villagery is missing, replaced with near-poverty and depression. Characterisation is much better than usual with Rhode. The prime suspect husband, following the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius (and thankfully not that of his son Commodus), is a fine character, as are his wife and her cousin. There is more psychology than usual with Rhode. Possible impotence is discussed as a motive, and the loveless marriage and sexual affair are both, so far as I know, touched in with a delicacy unusual in Rhode’s work.

Yet the book suffers from one fundamental problem: dullness. The book is stodgy, lifeless, and padded, filled with long analyses of suspects’ movements and pointless interrogations. Rhode’s customary flashes of humour — all the funnier for being understated — are as absent as his usual optimism; and there is virtually no excitement in the book—the reader is likely to have tumbled to the murderer’s identity several chapters before the villain’s identity is revealed. The solution is not particularly ingenious, although the humanity of the lengthy confession makes up for this to some degree.

Yet the reader is left at the end feeling disappointed — humour gone, ingenuity squandered, all in place of characterisation and psychology — a warning to the curious, a forerunner of the curse of the latter half of the twentieth-century, the bleakness of the novel and the fundamental emptiness of the characters’ lives serving as an ancestor to the suicidal depression of PD James — a disease from which even the usually reliable John Rhode is not immune.