FFB: A Crime Remembered
Roderic Jeffries (1926- ) was born in London, the son of writer Graham Montague Jeffries who was known for his series featuring the gentleman crook-sleuth "Blackshirt." Roderic Jeffries didn't immediately follow in his father's footsteps, going to sea at the ripe old age of 17. He later became an attorney, but the lure of writing was too great, and since publishing his first novel in 1951 (taking over the "Blackshirt" character), he's penned over one hundred and sixty novels under his own name and several other pseudonyms, including Peter Alding, Roderic Graeme, Graham Hastings and Jeffrey Ashford.
Thirty-six of the author's books featured Enrique Alvarez, police inspector on the island of Mallorca, but he wrote even more titles under his Jeffrey Ashford pen name, including A Crime Remembered from 1987. The plot centers on the Tourkville family, who has owned Highland Place for generations and whose present owner, Edward Pierre Darcy Tourkville, plans on keeping the estate his father almost ruined via neglect and mismanagement. Standing in his way is a sordid seafaring episode from his past during World War II he thought he'd been able to put behind him but now threatens to ruin everything he's built.
Detective-Constable Pete Noyes, a man with no love lost for the privileged upper classes, is assigned to the recent case of a middle-aged homosexual man found murdered, a large stash of bank-notes in his safe that could point to blackmail. With only minimal clues—the name of a town, Glinton, and the initials EPDT—Noyes's investigations take him square into the path of Tourkville. Both Tourkville and the murdered man served on the same ship in the Merchant Marine and were two of only four survivors of the ship's sinking. Hoping to pin the murder on Tourkville, Noyes gradually and grudgingly comes to admire the man, thanks in no small part to Tourkville's devoted wife Charlotte who begs Noyes to clear her husband's name.
As Kirkus Reviews pointed out, Ashford offers something other than a conventional whodunit, part murder-mystery, part psychological study, part police-portrait. The transformation of Noyes is as central to the plot as the murder on one level, or as Kirkus adds, "shrewdly counterpointing Noyes' rocky marriage with the Tourkvilles' sturdy-yet-threatened 40-year relationship." We learn where Noyes self-centered prejudices and tough shell came from, early on:
He despised weakness. Life was about fighting. Fighting the form bully because he couldn't name his father and although one-parent families were said to be fashionable, the form bully had decreed otherwise; fighting the viral infection which had baffled the doctors and specialists and which had, for a mind-numbing time, threatened to leave him paralysed; fighting his way out of a background which seldom let anyone go because most were stupid enough to believe that easy money need not carry a cost..."
As old case and new case intersect and two marriages are put to the test, Ashford skillfully weaves the threads together into a tapestry of regret, redemption and learning to let go of the past.
