A Deed Without A Name
A review of A Deed without a Name by Dorothy Bowers
The third of Dorothy Bowers’ five crime novels, originally published in 1940 and now reissued by Moonstone Press, takes its title from what the acting profession call Shakespeare’s Scottish play. In case you might have missed the Shakespearean reference, each of the chapters begins with a quote from the Bard, a testament to the author’s encyclopaedic knowledge of his works or the power of her concordance.
The dread deeds are a couple of murders, the first to be discovered that of amateur sleuth, Archy Mitford. When we first meet Archy, he has already survived three attempts on his life, once when a car drove straight at him, the second when he ate some chocolates which had been poisoned, and the third when someone tried to push him in front of a commuter train. After a school reunion he tells two of his chums, Tony Wynkerell and Philip Beltane, about his concerns about for his safety but refuses to contact the police.
What does he know that someone thinks is worth murdering him for and has it anything to do with the disappearance of a retired businessman, Sampson Vick, in whose fate Mitford has suddenly taken a keen interest? What lies behind his obsession for drawing a particular type of bird as a doodle?
Mitford changes his plans for the weekend and instead of accompanying his aunt to Essex he stays in London but visits his aunt’s deserted house where he writes some entries in his diary. Someone knocks at the door – clearly Mitford knows who he is – and the following day his body is found suspended from a rope. Although it looks like suicide, he sustained a blow to the head before being strung up. Inspector Pardoe, who is Bowers’ go-to detective for four of her five novels, leads the investigation, accompanied by Sergeant Salt.
Pardoe is a bit of a colourless character, competent, thorough, but lacking the sort of spark that warms the reader to more memorable fictional detectives. Where Bowers does score, though, is in her ability to create an atmosphere. The story is set at the outbreak of the Second World War, during the phoney war stage, but at a time when blackouts are enforced, adherence to which is a source of concern to some of the characters. A constant leitmotif is the difficulty it causes in getting around the metropolis, and a navigational error is both the source of Mitford’s key piece of information and his eventual undoing.
Bowers plays fair with her readers, and sprinkles enough clues in the text, although some may be hiding in the odd thicket or two and she delights in the occasional red herring, to work out who the culprit is. I was fairly convinced I was on the right track as soon as Mitford opened the door to his killer without having to search the inner recesses of what few grey cells I possess to (c)rake up an obscure country name for a bird I had spotted.
The discovery of a second body buried under the floor of the house that Mitford had mistakenly entered ties the Vick disappearance to the amateur sleuth’s murder, but for the purist the interchangeability of two brothers and the extensive use of extracts from a private diary are rather weak devices to bring the plot to a resolution.
An oddity, at least for this reader, is Speyer, Mitford’s German tutor. He is still at liberty even though war has been declared. It will only be a matter of time before he is interned.
This is a worthy book, entertaining enough in its own right, but one that fails to hit the heights of the classics of the genre.
