Book Corner – July 2020 (2)
Family Matters – Anthony Rolls
Many best-selling and well-regarded books from the Golden Age of detective fiction, the two qualities are not always mutually exclusive, have long languished in obscurity, often out of print. One service that the British Library Crime Classics series has performed for the reading public is making some gems of the genre more readily available. Published in 1933 Family Matters is one that has been wrested from the clutches of neglect.
Technically, the book is an inverted mystery in that we know someone will be murdered and, pretty early on, the identity of the victim. What we do not know is who will do it and how. The action is set in Shufflechester, described as “one of the most English of English towns”.There the Kewdinghams live and their household is not a happy one. Robert, unemployed, spends his time curating his collection full of artefacts which are probably Roman but to the rest of his family and acquaintances are little more than boxes and cupboards overflowing with junk. Bertha, his wife, half-French, there is an element of xenophobia in the narrative, is attractive and spirited, leading the menfolk to wonder how on Earth Robert came to marry her and the womenfolk to think that she should be doing something to make Robert buck up his ideas. Robert also believes that in a former life he was a priest in Atlantis. Added to this, he is a hypochondriac and keeps a large stock of poisons to hand.
I won’t be spoiling the book by telling you that the victim is intended to be the infuriating and annoying Robert. Both Bertha and his physician, Dr Bagge, plot to poison Robert. Whilst trying to stop Robert drugging himself with his own medications, Bagge, somewhat disturbingly, views his patient as human guinea pig upon whom he experiments with potions of increasing toxicity. To the bafflement of both poisoners, Robert appears to be remarkably resilient to the industrial amounts of poison pumped into his system. The reason, of course, is that the poisons are cancelling each other out. Eventually Robert does die but how and who killed him?
Unlike many an inverted mystery where the reader knows both the identity of the victim and the perpetrator, here Rolls does an excellent job in keeping the reader somewhat in the dark. We have our suspicions about who does it but cannot be certain until the very end. This means that the book is much more of a page turner than less skilfully written books of this type. As Rolls says in the opening, “everything was foreseen – everything except what actually happened”.
Rolls enjoys himself depicting the humdrum nature of middle-class life, their petty squabbles, irritations and conventions and the story is laced with humour. The characters are drawn well, not just Robert and Bertha, but the others too in the Kewdingham circle. It is not a demanding story, just a good yarn with a slight twist to it. The book gets better as it goes on and the denouement well crafted.
It is worth looking out for, if you are interested in well-written crime novels.
