1964 mystery, fifth in the series about Chief Inspector Henry
Tibbett. When the film's leading man stumbles across the platform and
dies under the wheels of an Underground train, it's clearly an accident.
But then the continuity girl falls to her death from her flat…
A change from the Tibbett pattern, here: the book is narrated in
the first person by one of the principals of the film company –
"Pudge" the money man, despised by the "artists" who are the rest of
the board, and as a fat man feeling that he can only be pompous or
comic, and choosing the former. He's tedious and irksome even (perhaps
especially) when he has a point. (And of course Moyes will have read
That Book by Christie, and may be choosing to use Pudge's elision of
things that make him look bad to make him the murderer too; he soon
fixes his recorded suspicions upon one person in particular.)
The actual technicalities of the deaths are frankly baroque. Vs gur
ntrvat yrnqvat zna qbrfa'g jnag nalbar gb xabj uvf fvtug vf tbvat, naq
pna jrne pbagnpg yrafrf va bgure ebyrf, jul qbrfa'g ur whfg jrne gurz
urer gbb, engure guna (sbe guvf bar ebyr va juvpu ur unf gb jrne
tynffrf) abg jrnevat gur yrafrf ohg trggvat n frpbaq frg bs cebc
fcrpgnpyrf znqr hc va uvf cerfpevcgvba? Naq pbhyq n pnaqyrjnk frny
ernyyl ubyq n jvaqbj pybfrq ntnvafg gur jrvtug bs na hapbafpvbhf
obql hagvy gur fgbir jnezrq hc gur xvgpura naq znqr vg zryg, jvgubhg
oheavat gur obql gung vf ba gur yrqtr orgjrra fgbir naq jvaqbj?
But this isn't really a book about cunning ways of committing a
nearly-unsolvable murder; it's much more an observation of the people,
all of whom are of course horrible. But while that's a common problem
especially in post-war mysteries Moyes manages to keep this reader's
interest in spite of that, in spite even of the tediously clichéd
Italian leading lady.
"I defy you," I said, "to mention anything which could harm
Fiametta. She's written newspaper articles about how she was
arrested for stealing in Naples when she was thirteen, and seduced
by her uncle when she was fourteen, and set up in a love nest by
this film director when she was sixteen. The only hold Margery might
possibly have had over her would have been a threat to expose that
in fact she was perfectly respectable and had been reared in a
convent."
It shouldn't work, but it does. The more I read of Moyes the more
impressed I am.
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