Murder in Belgravia
GHITELMAN, DAVID
Murder in Belgravia A Coat of Varnish By C. P. Snow Scribner's. 328 pp. $10.95. Reviewed by David Ghitelman Mystery fiction comes in two varieties, the visceral and the cerebral. The visceral...
...Certain they know their culprit, the police are nevertheless caught in a bind: Their evidence is purely circumstantial, nothing that would hold up in court...
...Alec Luria, the novel's philosopher-in-residence, captures the tone when he observes: "Civilization is hideously fragile...
...We meet an ambitious assistant, a stolid cockney and a dependable married man having a fling with a young policewoman...
...The plot is simple...
...So Snow gives us pages of psychological dueling that achieve a level of sustained tension worthy of Dostoevsky...
...It also attracts Susan Thornkill, who wants to marry him, much to the distress of her father Tom, a Labor MP with aspirations to a Cabinet position...
...At the beginning of his career he had served under Humphrey Leigh in Cyprus, and when he enlists his former superior's aid we are intrigued by the veteran and the protege slowly trying to re-establish the necessary bonds of trust...
...Just a coat of varnish, wouldn't you say...
...A few days later she is found in bed, brutally murdered...
...But this is the British police: no violence allowed, no third degree...
...You know that...
...Then begins the long, intricate, arduous task of detection and apprehension...
...Its masters have been Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald...
...its most popular recent practitioner has been the eternally best-selling Agatha Christie, although aficionados of the form tend to prefer the works of Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout or P. D. James...
...After Lady Ashbrook has undergone tests for cancer, her friends gather to console and comfort her...
...In one of Snow's typically ironic touches, this spokesman for the working class is by far the novel's wealthiest personage...
...Equally illuminating is Briers' domestic life...
...For all its simplicity, the story does not proceed strictly according to formula...
...Observing the unhappy family situation as the book's controlling consciousness is Humphrey Leigh...
...Not surprisingly, therefore, Lord Snow's characters are eminently civilized...
...His friend Alec Luria, a Jewish-American psychologist, social critic, and full-time Anglophile, comments on the action from the outside, constituting a sort of Freudian-Talmudic Greek chorus...
...It is a neighborhood of late-Victorian mansions now inhabited by the rich, the comfortably middle class and an occasional aristocrat...
...Lady Ashbrook, a beauty of the Edwardian era who has lived a stormy amorous life (one character bitterly calls her "a society tart"), faces old age with stoicism and an unflagging adherence to her notion of style...
...The novel is not without its weaknesses, however...
...Briers is a compassionate man for whom we feel compassion...
...Since this is a mystery, its cast of characters of course includes the guardians of civilization, the police...
...Despite the author's classical approach, an underlying pessimism separates his story from the traditional cerebral whodunit...
...They are led by Chief Inspector Frank Briers, the most fully realized character in the book...
...The handling of the denouement displays another of the author's strengths...
...Still, as we might expect of C. P. Snow, this is not an ordinary murder mystery...
...Similarly, with the exception of Frank Briers, the characters remain decidedly one- or two-dimensional...
...Brought to an early perfection by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes series has yet to be equalled, it is nonetheless still going strong...
...We get to observe Lady Ashbrook, the victim-to-be, and her circle of acquaintances, the suspects-to-be, at considerable length before the murder takes place...
...A Coat of Varnish, C. P. Snow's second venture into the mystery genre, offers many of the pleasures of the more genteel tale of ratiocination...
...Where the first takes the reader on a roller coaster ride, or (to use the sort of overblown metaphor that typifies it) on a roller coaster ride through a house of horrors, the second has the effect of a quiet afternoon of bridge, inevitably well-played and enlivened by witty conversation...
...There's not much between us and the horrors underneath...
...And as the forensic surgeon examines the entrails of the grande dame, he coolly trades jibes with the detectives on hand...
...The only available course of action is to manipulate a confession through intensive interrogation...
...The prose, for example, too seldom rises above its basic function of moving the characters from one place to another...
...The visceral is baroque and American, specifically southern Californian...
...Once she is killed we are treated to a scene that reflects the author's special knowledge: Snow describes in grim, understated detail the autopsy of Lady Ashbrook...
...at 60 a retired intelligence officer, he "wears his anonymity like an overcoat...
...Her grandson, Loseby, is a handsome young military man whose distinctive charm facilitates his casual hedonism...
...Their frequent sexual exploits, all of which occur off stage, are recounted with a singular lack of passion...
...The cerebral is classical and English, or at least Anglophile...
...His is the only marriage in the novel untroubled by adultery, but his wife suffers from a debilitating nerve disease that frequently leaves her lame from the waist down and makes her subject to manic periods of elation...
...His carefully evoked setting is the Belgravia section of London, "the most homogenous residential district in any capital city in the world, and in a quiet and seemly fashion the most soothing to the eye...
...With the news from the doctor that the tests are negative, her friends gather again to celebrate...
Vol. 63 • January 1980 • No. 2
