Scandalize My Name
A review of Scandalize My Name by Fiona Sinclair – 250417
Fiona Sinclair was an actress married to a doctor and Scandalize My Name, originally published in 1960 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, is her one and only shot at crime fiction. Sadly, she died a year after its publication and we will never know how proficient a writer she could have been. Although no classic, this book shows considerable promise.
The opening chapter left me bewildered, too many characters to get my head around introduced at too fast a pace, but once the narrative settled down they began to fall into place and their respective importance and relevance to the development of the plot became clearer. It is the story of the murder of a blackmailer, Ivan Sweet, found dead in the bath, having been poisoned, the toxin introduced into his pot of cream he routinely had on a Saturday morning and which was, conveniently, left as usual in a communal but discreet place.
Blackmailers are hard to sympathise with and Ivan is a particularly unpleasant piece of work who winkles out dark secrets and uses his knowledge to feather his own nest. With a private income of his own, his blackmailing is as muc for pleasure as it is out of financial necessity. A tenant occupying the basement of the Southey’s house, Magnolia House, in the north London suburbs, his death occurs on the eve of Elaine Southey’s 21st birthday.
Most of the other occupants of the house, including the tenant of the attic, Naomi Moore, and the other attendees of the party have reason enough to hate Sweet and possibly even to kill him. Just for good measure, there is his impoverished brother living a hand-to-mouth with a wife and small children in tow, the beneficiary if anything happens to Sweet.
The task of establishing who killed Sweet and why falls to Superintendent Paul Grainger of the Yard, an urbane, empathetic policeman who takes his time to establish a rapport with witnesses and suspects alike. No lover of blackmailers, he shows a great deal of sympathy for Sweet’s victims as he painfully confronts them with their secrets and there is no doubting whose side he is on. However, as custodians of the law he and his able if rudely hewn Scottish assistant, Sergeant McGregor, have their duty to do, no matter how distasteful.
Fortunately, the culprit is the least likeable, and I am afraid to say, the most obvious of the suspects and has the grace to do away with themselves in the dramatic finale, saving Grainger the distasteful task of bringing them to book. Talking of which, it is a set of expensively bound books found among Sweet’s possessions that puts Grainger on the track of the killer and raises the delicious prospect of the blackmailer himself being the victim of another blackmailer for an indiscretion that led to his possessing his comfortable private income.
There is a little too much of the important investigations performed off camera for my liking, meaning that the motivation, other than the broad brush of blackmail, is difficult to fathom. What I found interesting was that Sinclair allowed herself space in her novel to indulge in some florid prose and explore some byways.
We are treated to a powerfully graphic and gruesome postmortem, drawing upon her insider knowledge courtesy of hubby, some fascinating ruminations on Stonehenge and some glowing descriptions of the countryside. Along the way we visit a mental institution, ponder on how a change in the law came too late to save William Southey from his awful marital dilemma, and a disturbed young woman with previous.
Detective fiction is not all procedure and process, a conveyor belt of suspects to interview. A good read.
