The Belting Inheritance
A review of The Belting Inheritance by Julian Symons – 240211
The Tichborne case, a cause célèbre in Britain in the 1860s and 70s involving a man emerging out of the blue claiming to be the missing heir to the Tichborne baronetcy, has cast its spell over writers ever since. Both Mary Fitt’s Death and the Pleasant Voices and Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar are their idiosyncratic takes on the theme and Julian Symons’ later The Belting Inheritance, originally published in 1965 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, is another addition to the sub-genre.
The book starts off with very much of a cosy country house murder feel about it. Belting, a country house, is owned by Lady Wainwright, a bit of a tyrant in her own right who keeps her family on a tight rein by dangling the prospect of a share of a presumed large inheritance. Of her four sons, two, Hugh and David, went missing during the Second World War, presumed dead. Stephen and Miles’ prospects of dividing the spoils are dealt a blow when someone claiming to be David suddenly turns up. His mother immediately accepts him as her lost son, but the other members of the family are less certain, even though, like Brat Farrar, he is able to answer most of their most searching questions. To add further frisson to the plot, Lady W is changing her will.
Unsurprisingly, the focus of the book is on whether the supposed David really who he says he is but suddenly in the second half veers off into an escapade into bohemian Paris on the search for potential Nazi collaborators who operated in Kent and the murderer of Hugh’s business partner. It is all a little disconcerting but it all makes sense when the storyline settles down and at least gives the narrative a bit of pace and action. There is an earlier murder, at least in terms of its place in the book rather than chronologically, that of Thorne, the old gardener, shortly after the return of David. While the reader might deduce that his demise is down to something to do with the returning son, his death is not investigated and is little more than a plot device to move the story on.
There is very much of a literary feel to the book. “La Comédie de l’ Amour” by Henrik Ibsen provides some of the clues to the mystery and the poems of John Donne and a couple of extracts from a book detailing experiences in a Russian prisoner of war camp go some way to establishing David’s identity. The book ends with two glorious twists, one which I will not divulge, but the other analogous to Captain Flint’s treasure chest in Treasure Island, both in their different ways symptomatic of the Wainwright’s famed sense of humour.
While the first half of the book is cosy murder mystery territory, albeit with an underplayed murder, the rest of the book is very much a rite of passage in which our narrator, the eighteen-year old Christopher Barrington, experiences casual sex, the joys and perils of drinking pastis, a dip into the world of actors and artists, and the pleasure of falling in love. The juxtaposition of these two worlds rather jars and the use of a first person narrative, especially one so naïve, was presumably intended to bridge that gap but did not succeed. A first person narrative does limit the range of a novel.
That all said, it was an enjoyable read and while none of Symons’ characters are particularly likeable, the reader has the satisfaction of knowing that they all get their just desserts, even the somewhat detached observer, Christopher Barrington.
