1940 murder mystery in rural England. Anna Milne, the local Mysterious
Widow, comes into the police station to report that she's run over and
killed a man. As the investigation progresses it starts to look as
though this was no accident; but ex-journalist Toby Dyke suspects the
police are on the wrong track.
Of course, the setup is a dated aspect in itself: the idea that
you might casually kill someone while driving in the dark, and
everyone would assume that this is just the kind of thing that
happens. If it weren't for the idea that it might have been
deliberate, it seems that nobody would think any more of it.
Although the book gets off to a slow start, it is at least in service
of the story: even the identification of the corpse is far from
certain, and while Ferrars sometimes feels as though she's struggling
with a cast that's just slightly too large she manages to avoid the
particular flaw of many mystery writers in which each suspect has only
a single sin, and once that sin is uncovered everyone accepts that
they can't also be the murderer. These people are rather more complex,
with things they don't want to talk about and preferred narratives
that they want to encourage.
‘Then I tell you, you can believe me, that woman's doing something—’
Suddenly Martha's tense face reddened. She looked down at the ground
and finished in a much less certain voice: ‘She's doing something
she ought not.’
‘And that,’ said Toby sternly, ‘is what you call not mincing matters.’
Dyke himself, and his mysterious friend George, don't even look like
protagonists at first; and while in most of these stories one of the
two would be a complete idiot to have the reasoning explained by the
other, theirs is more of a partnership of equals, with George spotting
things that Toby misses and vice versa.
The resolution is largely satisfying, with an explanation of events
that matches the psychology of the villain, though a late twist
doesn't entirely convince. As in many of Ferrars' later books, the
solution of the crime is the end of things; there's no resolution to
the emotional plots that have been going along in the background.
Perhaps it's more interesting now as an example of what writers who
weren't the Big Four were doing with the basic mystery framework as
the Golden Age was coming to an end, but there's certainly still
entertainment to be had here.
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