1945 murder mystery. Kay Bryant lives in a grotty bedsit in London; as
her neighbour is having a gas fire installed, the workmen turn up a
revolver under the floorboards, and it's linked to the murdered former
tenant of the flat. Suspicion follows.
Indeed, the body of the book is about the suspicion: it looks
very much as though whoever hid the gun, and perhaps the murderer,
must be one of the residents, and they all end up accusing each other,
in increasingly strident (not to say hysterical) tones. There's also a
significant thing that Kay, the viewpoint character, knows which isn't
mentioned until really quite late in the story.
What makes the business a little more interesting is that it's told in
flashback: a frame story has Kay revisiting the street some years
later, after the house has taken a direct hit from a bomb, and running
into the investigating officer from back in the day. (This is the sort
of thing that I naïvely expected most fiction written and published in
wartime to do, before I started reading a lot of them and realised
that mostly people didn't want to read about anything touching on
the war – they got enough of that from the newspapers.)
When Kay visits a cinema:
She […] spent a comfortably unthinking couple of hours watching a
heavy-jowled hero trying to establish his claim to a blonde heroine
and being incredibly clumsy about this relatively simple business.
There was a good deal of self-sacrifice in the story, not to mention
slugging and jumping in and out of aeroplanes and on the whole Kay
felt that she was having her money's worth.
There are also little bits of interesting contemporary detail: Kay has
separated from her husband, but they haven't bothered to get divorced,
because it's an expensive business and they'll come under disapproving
scrutiny. It's suggested that two women might have been "passionate
friends" without anyone raising an eyebrow. Even though everyone's
scrimping and saving, they casually go out for most of their meals.
I'm finding these early Ferrars enjoyable: she's perhaps a bit prone
to shrill nervy characters who are hard work to read and harder to
sympathise with, but she gets well into their heads, and has a
pleasant writing style.
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