Two-Way Murder
A review of Two-Way Murder by E C R Lorac – 230906
Any book by E C R Lorac, one of the pen names of Edith Caroline Rivett, is a welcome addition to the collection of this Golden Age detective fiction, but Two-Way Murder is an oddity in that it was never published until it was rescued in 2021 from her papers. It was written just before her death, and one wonders how far from her conception of what the finished article would be like it is. Nevertheless, it is a good story, one in which she manages to hide the identity of the culprit until the end. I had my suspicions, but was never quite sure, a sign of a good puzzle.
It is a standalone novel, standing outside of her usual Inspector Robert Macdonald series, and perhaps loses a little focus as a result. Most of the leg work is done by Inspector Waring, but Nicholas Brent and his friend MacBane and even the Maine’s housekeeper, Alice Ridley, have a go at solving the mystery, not always with the best of intentions.
There are two femmes fatales in the story. The first, Rosemary Reeve, we never meet, having disappeared on the eve of the previous year’s Hunt Hall, and is presumed to have thrown herself off the cliffs. The other, Dilys Maine, is very much central to the plot, the belle of the area and over whom two leading lights of the community, Nicholas Brent and Michael Reeve, are squabbling. Brent wins the right to take her to the ball, but on the way back on a particularly misty evening, they find a body stretched across the road. Brent, after discovering that the victim is dead, feels that it is his duty to call the police, but to avoid any scandal, tells Dilys to make her own way back to her house through the fields.
In an era before mobile phones, Brent has to walk to the nearest telephone which happens to be in Reeves’ house. With no one in, Brent breaks in, makes his call, and then is attacked by someone he believes to be Reeves. The police establish that the victim had been murdered and then subsequently run over by a vehicle with the same tyre prints as Reeves’ car.
Reeves seems the obvious suspect, but, as is pointed out, would he be so stupid as to leave evidence so clearly pointing to him so close to his door? In other words, was he set up? Lorac muddies the water by introducing Dilys’ father, a man with a strong puritanical streak, who has an obsession with the goings-on at the local pub and was behaving strangely on the night of the murder. Alice Ridley is particularly concerned to protect his interests. And then there is the publican, Hoyle, who was not averse to organising a spot of gambling and possibly even smuggling, who might have sought to get rid of an informant.
The identity of the victim takes some time to establish, but once that is done, the motivation for the crime becomes a little clearer. In essence, it is a story of love, revenge, and blackmail, one in which all the principal suspects all seem to have impeccable alibis. The resolution hangs on the presence of the fog and the difficulty of being absolutely certain which route you are taking, especially if you are a relative stranger to the area.
It struck me that there was quite a marked change of tone between the first and second halves of the book, the first lighter and slightly Wodehousian in dialogue, perhaps a reflection of the type of characters we were getting to know, while the second was straighter, more direct, and focused on confusing and then enlightening us. The finale was thrilling, Lorac’s characters were engaging, her fine sense of place and time came through, and the mystery was complex enough to sustain the tension right until the end. Lorac was a sadly underrated crime novelist.
