Martin Fone's Blog, page 49

A Silent Killer?

While the pressure to change from petrol or diesel cars to hybrid or electric vehicles continue apace, a fascinating piece of research featured in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health provides another factor to piece into the decision-making process. Data from 32 billion miles of battery-powered car travel and 3 trillion mils of petrol and diesel vehicle trips in the UK suggest that mile-for-mile electric and hybrid vehicles are twice as likely to hit pedestrians as fossil-powered vehicles and three times more likely in urban settings.

Of course, the question is why. Electric vehicles are quieter so more difficult to hear, although since 2019 new models are required to have an acoustic vehicle alerting system that emits a sound when driven slowly, have faster acceleration and, as they are heavier, have longer stopping times. Perhaps driving an electric vehicle promotes a sense of well-being and oneness with the world that means the driver is oblivious to what is going on around them.

Makes you think.

The Port Of London Murders

A review of The Port of London Murders by Josephine Bell – 240525

Apart from a couple of short stories, this is the first novel of Josephine Bell’s that I have read, a lamentable admission as she wrote over sixty. Originally published in 1938 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, The Port of London Murders is as far removed from the cosy country house murder and, indeed, from a classic murder mystery as you can imagine. It is, however, a cleverly constructed story and one that sheds a light on the social conditions of the time.

Bell practised as a doctor in the Greenwich area and draws upon her first-hand experience of the social conditions in which the riparian poor lived. Many of the men folk were either reliant upon casual labour or were unemployed and lived in housing that was little more than slums, even at the time scheduled for demolition, a process that the Germans completed with their usual ruthless efficiency. Mists and impenetrable fogs caused havoc with the residents’ health with asthma, bronchitis, pneumonia, tuberculosis, rheumatism and the like rife. Most of Bell’s characters do not live in a gilded cage. This is grimy, real life and her descriptions of their hand to mouth existence gives the book a social edge that is often missing from crime fiction of the era.

The book starts off with a seemingly disconnected series of events and an almost overwhelming  raft of characters and at first it is difficult to discern where the story is going to go or whether we should sympathise with or despise any of them that we meet. However, Bell’s skill lies in her ability to moulkd these disparate strands into a coherent whole and we soon realise that the nexus point is the activities of a criminal gang. We know their identities, there is no mystery there, but the focus is more on how they operate and the consequences of getting entwined with them. It is another piece of crime fiction where a group of street-smart and inquisitive small boys play an integral part in discovering what is really going on.

We have a suicide of a drug-addled woman that might not be a suicide, the mysterious disappearance of Detective Sergeant Chandler who was hot on the trail of the gang and about to give evidence at the inquest, pink nightdresses that sell for a high price in a shop called Lulu, an accident involving a couple of barges which results in some cargo going overboard, packing cases with hidden drawers, a spot of blackmail, drugs and desperadoes. As the chief culprit realizes that some that they had trusted had given them away and the noose is tightening around their neck, the body count increases.

The culprit might have eventually have eluded the hangman’s noose but the manner of their end in a thrilling finale is probably more horrific. Amongst the death and grime, there is one area of shining light, Bell finding time to develop an engaging love story that results in the beau appearing deus ex machina-like and saving his beloved in her moment of extreme peril. There is only one way that sub plot is going to end!

There is much to admire in what is a clever and unconventional book. To my mind there were echoes of the opening of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend which first opened my eyes to the sub-culture that existed on the banks of the Thames and Bell even takes time to corral into the investigations Christopher Bush’s Detective Norris, although operating with a higher rank, and Freeman Wills Crofts’ Inspector Mitchell. If you look hard enough, there are wonderful gems to find, just as there is in the mud of the Thames at low tide. Highly recommended.

Postcard Smut

The assault on saucy seaside postcards, spearheaded by the Director of Public Prosecutions and implemented by the police, began in earnest in the early 1950s. In Blackpool, acting upon information received, a plain clothes officer would visit a shop, pick up the offending postcard, ask the shopkeeper whether they would sell it to their daughter, invariably receiving the response “No”, and then a prosecution would follow. Once the word got out, other shopkeepers would withdraw their stock of those postcards from sale. In 1953 32,603 postcards were seized under the Obscene Publications Act (1857).

In most major seaside resorts Watch Committees, self-appointed and made up of local worthies, were set up to vet and deal with reports of “obscene” cards in their area, ostensibly to reassure shopkeepers that if a certain design passed muster, they would be immune from prosecution. However, there was no national standard as to what was deemed to be offensive, although jokes about wind and other forms of toilet humour seemed high on the list, and so a postcard that was deemed to be acceptable in one resort could be banned in another. The general air of uncertainty led to the wholesale withdrawal of such postcards from sale.

However, the moral crusaders were not done and had the “King of the Saucy Postcard” and his publishers, Bamforth, firmly in their sights, finally bringing a charge of breaching the Act against him in July 1954. Donald McGill’s defence posed the not unreasonable question: “are the cards capable of corrupting the minds and morals into the hands they come?” Surprisingly, McGill insisted that he was simply naive, claiming that “I would desire to point out that in quite a number of the cards in question I had no intention of “double meaning” and, in fact, a “double meaning” was in some cases later pointed out to me”.

McGill was found guilty, fined £50 with £25 costs, and four of his offending postcards were banned immediately and his publishers were prevented from reissuing seventeen others. The verdict sent shock waves through the postcard industry, retailers cancelling orders and withdrawing stock and some smaller publishers going into bankruptcy.

In 1957 McGill was invited to give evidence to a House Select Committee, which was considering amending the Obscene Publication Act. He argued that a national censorship system would not work due to the vagaries of individual taste. The subsequent amendment in the law led to the waning of the powers of Watch Committees and gave the green light for saucy postcards to make a return.

McGill, though, hardly benefited from the renaissance, dying in 1962 having prepared all his designs for the 1963 season. He left an estate of just £735 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Streatham Park cemetery. His last designs were published in 1968.

The final nail in the coffin of saucy postcard industry was a change in public taste. By any stretch of the imagination their subject matter was sexist, sometimes racist, certainly politically incorrect, occasionally racist or xenophobic, as out of fashion as the humour of Benny Hill, the televisual manifestation of the saucy postcard. There was no place for them in the 21st century moral spectrum.

Despite that, McGill’s original colour-washed drawings now sell for several thousand pounds a time and examples of his postcards are soughtafter. His work was displayed at the Tate Britain exhibition, Rude Britannia: British Comic Art, in the summer of 2010, and there is a museum dedicated to his work in Ryde on the Isle of Wight. That would have brought a smile to the face of the former naval draughtsman who got into the postcard industry thanks to a get-well card he designed for a relative.

The Case Of The Fourth Detective

A review of The Case of the Fourth Detective by Christopher Bush – 240524

It is curious how a TBR pile constructed at random can display unexpected thematic links. Take the thirty-ninth novel in Christopher Bush’s long-running Ludovic Travers series, The Case of the Fourth Detective, originally published in 1951 and reissued by Dean Street Press. Rather like the later Surfeit of Suspects by George Bellairs it deals with financial skullduggery and like Agatha Christie’s earlier Cards on the Table has the concept of four sleuths working on the case. To complete the strange linkage Curtis Evans’ excellent introduction suggests that one of the characters, the larger than life Matthew Solversen was loosely based on another Dean Street Press favourite, E R Punshon.

Reading it as a general election is called, it is fascinating to recall how punitive levels of taxation were in the period immediately after the Second World War. A transformative social revolution was underway with the introduction of free healthcare, moderately decent housing and the reconstruction of a war-ravaged economy and country and so for the majority the concept of soaking the rich was not an unwelcome strategy. Bush, though, is one of the more overtly political crime writers and this book is a prime example of his distaste for Atlee’s government and its fiscal policies.

The book focuses around the murder of Owen Ramplock and its consequences on a privately owned business which is now facing the prospect of having to fund the second lot of death duties within a year or so after the death of the previous owner, Sam Ramplock. There is a very real prospect that company would either have to go public, like W H Smith, or be taken over, neither routes appealing to Ramplock’s widow, Jane. There is, however, a knight in rather tarnished armour, Herringwood, who is willing to take over the company, albeit to save his own skin and avert his shareholder’s attention from a major faux-pas.

As is his wont Bush has created a complicated web of motives. Owen Ramplock was disliked by his senior staff, difficult to work with and in his private life was conducting an affair. He was also a fresh air fiend, a fact that is to prove significant. There is a mysterious visitor, Prince, who appears to have been on the scene when Ramplock was murdered and, also, when Winter was killed for knowing too much, rock-solid alibis which need to be broken, a small shoal of red herrings, a false moustache, a mystery woman whose identity holds a key to the mystery, and a decent number of suspects.

There is much for Travers, Wharton and Matthews to get their teeth into. Travers and Wharton’s relationship is one of mutual respect and rivalry and once more Wharton is quick to claim the credit when Travers’ wilder theories turn out to be correct. The book is structured rather like a prolonged tease for the reader, the clues are all there but the narrative does its best to obfuscate matters and we are grateful for Travers’ end of case notes to provide a clear precis of what we have just read. Always mistrust the person who seems to be most helpful.

Having followed Travers through thirty-nine cases, it is interesting to reflect on the changes in his character, some subtle, some les so. He is now far removed from the intellectual, almost ascetic, upper class man that we first encountered. He is now married, although his wife, Bernice, does seem to be away a lot, claims now to be middle class and is not averse to a dalliance, on this occasion with the young secretary at Ramplock’s, Daisy Purkes. Perhaps the key to the longevity of the series is Bush’s willingness to keep his principal character broadly in tune with the changing mores of British society. Bush never fails to provide his reader with a fascinating intellectual puzzle and an insight into a changing world.

Josiah Eaton

Another notable practitioner of pedestrianism, a form of long distance walking which was all the rage in late Georgian Britain and the first half of the 19th century, was a baker from Woodford in Northamptonshire, Josiah Eaton. Captain Barclay had set the bar in walking a mile an hour for 1,000 consecutive hours and others, including Eaton, were determined to achieve even greater feats of endurance. Eaton set out to walk 1,100 miles in 1,100 hours, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Thomas Standen had performed the feat in 1811.

Strangely, given George Wilson’s problems, he chose to use a similar course, a quarter of a mile long marked by two red flags near the Hare and Billet pub in Blackheath. Fearing interference from the authorities, Eaton let it be known that he was not walking for money and had made no bets on the outcome. Setting off on November 10, 1815 wearing a white hat, blue coat, and striped waistcoat, he adopted Barclay’s tactics of walking a mile in the last quarter of an hour and another immediately thereafter, ensuring that he had around 90 minutes’ rest before starting again.

Rumours began circulating that Eaton was not walking at night, a suggestion he refuted vigorously, even issuing an affidavit, signed by four witnesses who attested that they had been on the course with him since the start. On Boxing Day 1815 he had completed the feat, throwing in an extra 100 miles for good measure, in what The Gentleman’s Magazine described as an “extraordinary task of pedestrianism which…has not only exceeded all former experiments of this nature, but given convincing proof that man is scarcely acquainted with his own capacity and powers.”

On finishing he learned that Standen had already performed the feat and as he had not earned any money from his pedestrianism, within a month he was languishing in a debtor’s prison. Upon his release Eaton organized another prodigious feat of pedestrian endurance, walking a mile an hour for 1,100 successive hours but this time starting each mile at the top of the hour and completing it within twenty minutes. This meant that he would only get about 45 minutes’ rest at best each hour.

Setting out once more at Blackheath on June 10, 1816, Eaton quickly got into his stride, adapting his sleeping patterns to taking cat naps and despite various attempts by those who had bet against him to thwart his progress, again reminiscent of George Wilson’s experience in the area, on July 20th and after nearly 46 days of walking he completed his walk in front of an “immense crowd”. He then did a victory lap, completing a mile in twelve minutes, after which “the air rang with acclamations and partaking of some refreshment”.

Later that year, Eaton took on an even more extraordinary challenge, to walk 2,000 half miles in 2,000 consecutive half hours, meaning that he would only have twenty minutes’ rest at best before starting off again. Dubbed the “sleep walker”, he set out on October 23, 1816, using a quarter mile out-and-back path off the Brixton Causeway, three miles from Croydon.  

Despite making good progress, Eaton released a shock statement to the effect that as he had been deceived by those who were supposed to have put up the money for his purse, he would abandon his attempt on December 5th at 11.00 just one mile short. He was true to his word.

Bizarrely, Eaton even attempted to walk a quarter of a mile every 15 minutes over 4,032 consecutive quarter miles, setting out on May 11, 1818 across the way from the Pot of Flowers Inn in Stowmarket. Despite heavy rain and hot sunshine, having perfected the technique of falling asleep at the drop of the hat and waking to the slightest touch, he completed his feat on July 30th, after which he was paraded through the streets in front of a crowd of 2,000 people.

Pedestrian mania, indeed!  

Cards On The Table

A review of Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie – 240523

The fifteenth novel in her Hercule Poirot series and the third in her Superintendent Battle series, Cards on the Table, originally published in 1936, is considered to be one of Christie’s finest novels. It features an impossible murder, the host of a party, Mr Shaitana, being murdered in a room containing four other people playing bridge and yet no one sees who did it.

The victim, Mr Shaitana, is an intriguing character, a self-confessed admirer of murder as an art form, a sinister Mephistophelian character – Shaitana is a term used to describe the devil in Hindi – who delights in collecting things. Perhaps his finest piece of collecting proves to be his undoing, assembling a bridge party consisting of four sleuths, Poirot, Colonel Race, Ariadne Oliver, who is to feature in several of Christie’s novels, and Superintendent Battle, and four gusts whom he believes to be murderers but who have not been convicted, Dr Roberts, Mrs Lorrimer, Anne Meredith, and Major Despard.

During the meal Shaitana taunts the suspects, making remarks designed to make one of them believe that not only does he know that they are a murderer but that he may well reveal the fact in front of Battle. This fear prompts one of them to take action and silence their host, but which one?

In a spirit of fair play, Battle invites the three amateur sleuths to help him get to the bottom of the who, why, and how. By allowing the sleuths to tease out the histories of the four suspects using radically different methods, Christie brings variety to the investigative process. To the astonishment of them all, Poirot concentrates on the bridge playing styles of the suspects, believing that the way they play the game gives psychological insights into their character and whether they would be capable of murder that could only have been spontaneous as the weapon of choice, a stiletto, was taken from Shaitana’s collection lying on a table.

Poirot is also fixated on the score cards, trying to determine whether there was a change in playing style of any of the players during the course of the game, indicative of some mental disturbance which might give a clue to their guilt. He is helped by Mrs Lorrimer who has an excellent retentive memory, convincing him that she would prefer a premeditative approach to murder over spontaneity.

Inevitably, Shaitana’s suspicions about four of his guests turn out to be well-founded. The sleuths establish in their various ways that each had killed someone, but this does not really narrow down the field. Apart from some digging into past histories, Race and Oliver do not really contribute much and Battle’s conventional approach to investigation does not take the case much farther. It is left to Poirot, using a combination of psychology and trickery, to cut through the Gaudian knot and reveal the truth in a surprising and brilliant twist.  

Laced with humour, this is a compelling and engaging story that allows Christie to showcase her storytelling abilities. The set up is masterful, the ending is brilliant and while there might be too many convenient coincidences for the purist and some of the attitudes exhibited might offend the more sensitively attuned, I will lay my cards on the table; this is one of Christie’s best.

Withers G1 Gin

A recent trip to Cornwall and Constantine, the spiritual home of Drinkfinder UK, gave me the opportunity to select some new (at least to me) gins with which to stock my cabinet. Readers by now should realise that I am a sucker for a beautifully and elegantly designed bottle and there was an air of inevitability that Withers G1 Gin should catch my eye.

It is deceptively simple in design, made of clear glass, squat and cylindrical in shape with almost flat shoulders, a medium sized neck and a glass stopper. The sense of elegant minimalism is enhanced by the bold design decision to eschew labelling and add the necessary information in white lettering directly onto the bottle. This means that the image of the heartsease plant on the rear can be seen through the front and the imagery and lettering is made more prominent if the bottle is against a dark background, as it usually would be on a shop’s shelf. It is a very clever and thoughtful design.

By the standards of the ginaissance, Withers Gin is a relatively new kid on the block, having been founded by the eponymous Susan in 2020. Under the guidance of the former Head Distiller at Burleigh’s Gin, Ed Gibson, she produced her first gin, G1, initially at Bond Street Distillery until, in 2022, she moved operations to her own distillery in Derby. 2022 was a momentous year as Susan launched her second gin, G-Force, a stronger variation of the G1 recipe.

Using a grain base spirit, eight botanicals go into the mix: juniper, pink grapefruit zest, coriander seeds, angelica, cassia bark, orris root, green cardamom, and the star of the show, heartsease. The latter, I believe, is a new botanical to me, Viola tricolor, to give it its botanical name, and is also known as wild pansy and love-in-idleness. It has a long tradition of use in herbal medicine, prized for its abilities to treat cardiovascular conditions, epilepsy, skin conditions and used as an expectorant for respiratory problems. Apparently, it was Sarah’s mother’s favourite flower adding a note of poignancy to its selection.

I was concerned that its mildly sweet, herbaceous flavouring would make a more floral type of gin, but I need not have worried. This is a bold spirit that is firmly in the London Dry stable, which cleverly and subtly interweaves the sweeter floral notes into a more traditional soft spicy base. Yes, of course you can detect the heartsease, but it bobs in and out of the palate, allowing its fellow botanicals a chance to shine, especially the juniper and the zesty citric notes. With an ABV of 40% this crystal clear spirit provides a long lightly peppered, spicy aftertaste, making for a beautifully balanced drink.

An elegant spirit in an elegant bottle, what is there not to like?

Until the next time, cheers!

Surfeit Of Suspects

A review of Surfeit of Suspects by George Bellairs – 240522

A feature of 1960s municipal life, brought into the spotlight by the likes of Private Eye, was corruption and shady dealings, especially around the subject of planning applications. Many a small fortune was made by speculating on land for which planning permission was imminent, making access to inside knowledge worth its weight in gold. George Bellairs’ long-running series sleuth, Thomas Littlejohn, unearths an early example in Surfeit of Suspects, originally published in 1964 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series.

Bellairs’ own experience as a banker comes into its own in this tale of financial shenanigans and skullduggery which opens in explosive fashion. Three of the five directors of the Excelsior Joinery company are killed when there is a massive explosion in the administrative unit after hours, while the three were holding an unofficial meeting. The company was in financial difficulties and this could have been a ham-fisted attempt to obtain an insurance payout. But why time the explosion for when there were people in the office? Or was it a targeted attempt to murder one or more of the directors and, if so, why?        

Of the three victims, John Willie Dodd, Dick Fallows, and John Willie Piper, Dodd was the dominant character, in charge of the company’s finances and the one responsible for persuading his fellow directors to sink their money into a company that was already failing. He was also a womanizer, having an affair with the wife of one of the surviving two directors, Fred Hoop, who, along with his father, Tom, was conspicuously absent from the meeting. Tom, though, was in bed ill and quickly dies while Fred has a cast-iron alibi as he was out visiting his wife at the time of the explosion.

Littlejohn is a meticulous, thorough, unexciting detective and much of the book is a police procedural, full of interviews and investigations from which the reader learns more information about the situation of the company. Bellairs leads his reader gently through a maze of characters, teasing out their interrelationships and possible motivations for wanting to commit murder. And along the way we meet some intriguing characters including a disillusioned bank manager who went out on a limb to lend the Excelsior money, unlikely now to be recovered save for a policy taken out on Dodd’s life for the outstanding amount. Then there is Bugler, the company cashier, who has a gambling addiction and is in debt to his bookmaker brother-in-law. And where does the bumptious and unpleasant councillor, Vintner, fit into it all?

There is a quarry nearby and four sticks of dynamite recently went missing, two of which were used on an abortive raid on the local bank’s safe. As Littlejohn investigates how the dynamite was obtained, he realizes that there are close links between the quarry’s directors and some of the characters under investigation for the explosion and allows him to narrow down his surfeit of suspects. Rather like Poirot he gathers all the prime suspects together to reveal his reconstruction of events and who the murderer was.

Ultimately, this is a case of double-dealing, both in personal and business relationships and a father’s overwhelming desire to protect his child. Although Bellairs presents us with a surfeit of suspects, the real culprit is not difficult to discern. Whilst it does not maintain the heights of its opening, it is an engaging and enjoyable story which lifts an early lid on the sort of municipal chicanery that was to become a feature of the next decade.

Saucy Seaside Postcards

On July 15, 1954 a seventy-nine-year old man found himself in front of the magistrates court in Lincoln charged with breaking the Obscene Publications Act (1857). How he got there sheds a fascinating light on British culture and moral attitudes.

In an age of instant communication and oversharing, it is easy to forget that sending a postcard to friends and relatives was de rigueur for holidaymakers, informing them of their safe arrival and some brief details of their experience. Postcards made their first appearance in Britain in 1870. They were plain, the front reserved for the address with an imprinted halfpenny stamp, half the price to post a letter, and the back reserved for a message. They proved enormously popular, with over 75 million sent in Britain in 1871, rising to over 800 million by 1910.

The Post Office’s monopoly on the production of postcards was broken in 1894 with the introduction of picture cards followed, in 1902, by the familiar divided back postcard, with room for both the address and the message on the back, and an image on the front. One of the first companies to exploit this new market was Bamforth & Company Limited of Holmfirth, switching from portrait photography in 1903, often using scenery sets from their photography work. In 1910 they began to tap into an even more lucrative market, employing the skills of Donald McGill amongst others, to produce saucy postcards to sell to holidaymakers.  

Over a fifty year period McGill, the “King of the Saucy Postcard”, produced around 12,000 designs, for each of which he never received more than three guineas, which adorned some 200 million postcards. He categorized the vulgarity of his work as mild, medium or strong, calling them a “skit on pornography”.

Women were either young and shapely or middle-aged and fat, men were hen-pecked or strapping Adonises, professionals were stereotyped, lawyers as swindlers, vicars nervous and inept, and double-entendres and schoolboy humour ruled the roost. One of McGill’s designs showing a bookish man asking a pretty woman whether she liked Kipling to which she replied “I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled!” sold over six million copies, a world record.

It was as if there was a complete transformation of the British psyche when they went on holiday. Those who would ordinarily reject any form of impropriety could not get enough of the postcards which were wildly successful. Writing in 1941, George Orwell described them as “a genre of their own, specializing in a very “low” humour, the mother-in-law, baby’s nappy, policeman’s boot type of joke, and distinguishable from all other kinds by having no artistic pretension”.

Although he appeared to be sniffy about them, Orwell was not advocating that they disappear. Instead he thought that they fulfilled a psychological need, appealing to the baseness to which we all need from time to time to express or as he put it, “on the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time”. To illustrate Orwell’s point by the early 1950s Bamforth’s series of comic postcards was its best-selling line, leading  Punch magazine to hail McGill as “the most popular, hence most eminent English painter of the century”.

However, not everyone shared Punch’s enthusiasm or Orwell’s understanding and there was to be a sea change in the attitude of public authorities which was to imperil the future of the saucy seaside postcard. Believing that public morals had declined during the Second World War and that the dial needed to be reset, the director of public prosecutions, Sir Theobald Mathew, together with the police led the assault on postcard smut.

This Way Out

A review of This Way Out by James Ronald – 2405

Originally published in 1939 this is the main course of volume three of James Ronald’s work reissued by Moonstone Press. It is a deeply affecting novel, a mix of inverted murder mystery and a deep dive into the psychology of a murder. There is a cinematic quality about the writing and there is no surprise that it provided the base for Charles Laughton’s 1944 film, The Suspect. It is a study of loneliness leading to entrapment and how individuals in a desperate search for a way out often make the wrong choices, making their predicament even worse.

The book starts with an encounter between the main protagonist, Philip Marshall, and a drunken failed writer, Simmons, where they discuss how to commit the perfect murder, a subject that is to have important implications for both of them. Marshall is trapped in a loveless and suffocating marriage to Cora, a slovenly, lazy woman, who refuses to release him from his living hell. His situation is made worse when he meets Mary, initially as a friend both needing shoulders to cry on but then something more develops, especially when Philip learns that she is with child. It is not his but the looming arrival of a child is Mary’s own trap and marriage is the only way out.

When Cora discovers the affair and adamantly refuses to allow Philip a divorce, there is only one option available – to murder her. She falls down the stairs and to make sure, Philip hits her over the head. Although the police are convinced whodunit, they appear not to have sufficient evidence to charge Philip with murder and he is able to marry Mary, but his troubles are not over. Philip sees his only son, John, making the same disastrous choices as he did, about to enter what would be a loveless marriage, and persuades him to break off the engagement. Then Simmons reappears and threatens blackmail. In a set of scenes laced with black humour, Philip is forced to remove his would-be tormentor.

But Philip is a reluctant murderer with a conscience and when he learns that an innocent is suspected of Simmons’ murder, he embarks upon another desperate escape strategy, with surprising consequences.

The strength of the novel is in Ronald’s characterization. He introduces layer upon layer of mundane detail so that we understand the desperation of the situation that the main characters find themselves in and we understand their thought processes and how an astonishingly back choice can seem appealing and offering a solution to their pain. Yes, Philip is a murderer, a somewhat cack-handed one if the truth be known, but the reader’s sympathy is with him. The chapter, late in the novel which gives Philip’s reminiscences of his upbringing, is a master stroke, giving an extra layer of understanding to his predicament. He has known little else but disappointment and struggle.

This is no cosy country house mystery murder. This is urban living with all its grim reality and is a fine book which will live with me for some time. The Moonstone Press reissue comes with two “bonus” stories, a long short story featuring gangsters and a diamond heist written in a penny dreadful style, and a poignant short story with an amusing twist about how water ruined a man. This Way Out, though, is worth the cover price in itself.