Does anyone else have a decade which just doesn’t overly appeal to them when it comes to picking books to read? The 1980s is such a decade for me. I rarely wander into it with my reading, aside from the odd Elizabeth Ferrars novel. This is evidenced by the fact that there are a fair few reviews on this blog after nine years, yet only 16 of these are for novels published in the 1980s. It is not my least popular decade for reading, as I have only reviewed 10 novels from the 1990s, but both decades are quite a jump down from the 28 novels I have reviewed from the 1970s and the 65 from the 1960s. (Incidentally, the figures start going up again once we hit the 2000’s, as I have reviewed 30 novels from that decade).
I have no prior experience of Radley’s work, so I was not sure what to expect.
Synopsis
‘Chief Inspector Quantrill is proud of his daughter Alison and of her job as secretary to Jasmine Woods, an attractive, successful romantic novelist. But it is Alison who finds Jasmine’s brutally murdered body and when she runs away from the scene, he is naturally very worried. His job is to find the murderer from amongst the men in Jasmine’s life, her neighbours and her friends – some of whom resent her riches and others who despise her kind of fiction. But as Quantrill does his best to unravel the mystery he finds his cannot solve the crime until his daughter’s return…’
Overall Thoughts
The story starts with Chief Inspector Quantrill meeting his daughter, Alison, at a train station and initially it seems like a rare occasion where a lead detective has a good relationship with his child, even if he doesn’t always see to see on her fashion choices: ‘[…] Alison would go for something more outlandish and impractical. It was unbecoming too: she was small, and the combination of the over-long shaggily lined coat with the straight hair that fell over her downcast face gave her the sad appearance of a neglected Skye terrier.’ However, the reader should avoid being fooled into thinking this means Quantrill’s family life is not dysfunctional. The signs are small to begin with, such as his inability to hug his grown-up daughters: ‘Embraces and endearments between adults, he reflected, seemed to come more naturally to established middle-class families than to uneasily indeterminate ones like his own.’ He decides it is too late to change this.
Alison is returning to live with her parents due to a failed relationship, and she is quite frank about it on the drive home, although as a whole family (including Quantrill’s wife and son) they struggle to talk over dinner, as it is revealed that none of them are very close to one another. The opening scene holds some interest in helping us form our first impressions of the lead detective, although I am not sure these impressions are necessarily positive ones, as we learn that Quantrill cheated on his wife the previous year. His marriage is not dead, but it is not close either and the narrative goes into far more detail about their problems than earlier detective novels probably would have done. Consequently, the first chunk of the story does seem to contain more male sexual frustration than I would have liked, including the bodily urges of Detective Sergeant Tait. We don’t really see Quantrill’s marriage from his wife’s point of view.
Fortunately, the book moves on to showing us how Alison becomes Jasmine’s secretary, a job she lands after meeting her at a party, Jasmine is hosting. This party introduces Jasmine’s family and friends and inevitably the reader begins wondering which one of her guests will kill her, because as Quantrill thought to himself: ‘He had never before been to a party where the guests seemed to regard it as a duty to insult their hostess.’
The narrative then jumps in time from February to April, when one morning Alison makes the shocking discovery of Jasmine’s body. The way Jasmine is treated by her killer is unpleasantly graphic. I can see why the writer did this, as it fits into the final solution, and it is also a clear early sign to the police that the killing is not the consequence of a burglary gone wrong. Nevertheless, reading it was not an enjoyable experience and I think this point could have been achieved another way.
The story spends some time looking at how Alison copes, or rather does not cope with the experience of finding the corpse. However, she rather loses reader sympathy when she decides that despite realising that she knows there is something wrong about the crime scene, she won’t tell her family or the police, as she feels it is all too awful and that it won’t help Jasmine. Her solution to avoid responsibility is to therefore run away from home, for the majority of what is left of this tale.
You can bet your last penny that the piece of information she possesses is the one bit her father needs to solve the case and that this information makes most of his other investigative actions (i.e. most of the novel) redundant. The story even wastes more time catching us up on what Alison does whilst she is away from home. These events don’t add anything of interest. Once Alison is found, she won’t talk to her dad about what she knows, but instead she wants to talk to his detective sergeant and even then, he has to take her away from the police station before she will talk. All of this just drags out what is a rather dull and boring story. The prose style is a key contributor to this, and I found it failed to engage me with the characters and by the end of the book I had stopped caring about who the killer might be.
I think the solution was probably chosen to be shocking or edgy, but structurally it is quite obvious and as such it fell flat for me. So alas I think this mystery has reminded me why I don’t tend to read many mysteries from the 1980s.
Rating: 3/5