I’ve read a lot of middle-of-the-road books lately, so thought I’d take away the pressure of expecting something to be good and read an author who is, at the very least, usually entertaining if nothing else.  And so The Nameless Crime (1932), the next Walter S. Masterman title on my TBR, comes into its own. Masterman’s Victorian tendencies — you can imagine his novels filmed in flickery black and white, with title cards for dialogue — prove oddly comforting, despite his plot structure at time leaning into the more infuriating end of the spectrum, and any preconceptions going in tending to get lost in the melee.  So how do we fare this time around? Not well.

The essential idea here is sound, and Masterman is to be commended for finding an unusual milieu in which to pitch his tale of cool-headed crooks and their dastardly doings, but the structure is frankly all over the place and it just about kills the whole thing stone dead. It is in chapter XXVI (of XXVII) that we finally learn of the inciting event which has given shape to the previous 229 pages and, ye gods, how no-one thought it might be useful for the reader to be clued into this sooner just astonishes me. There’s a good book here, there genuinely is, but this published version needs a solid 80 pages stripping from it and the narrative needs to be rearranged so that the story actually makes some sense, and — ugh — now I have to explain it all to you and I really can’t be arsed.

I mean, only about five people are going to read this anyway, so what’s the point?

Okay, so one morning Captain Jack Stanley calls on his good friend Hilary Borden only for Borden to fail to answer the door and Jack’s attempts to enter the flat to be stymied by a key on the inside of the lock. Jack summons a passing peeler, and the two men break in and find Borden stabbed to death. An unlocked window prevents this being an impossible crime, despite its listing in Adey, so don’t expect anything form this angle and — c.f. Masterman’s Victorian tendencies, which must never, ever be forgotten — you won’t be disappointed. Far more intriguing is the declaration by the police doctor that “I’ve never seen a body in that state a few hours after death” contrasting with Borden’s housekeeper’s insistence that she met and spoke with the man only a few hours before he can have been killed, but, well, perhaps more of that later.

Enter, then, Count Ginburg, the most Victorian villain to have ever villained — disfiguring solutions a speciality — and, well, lots of slow and tedious cat-and-mousery begins, in which Ginburg seems determined to get his hands on young Patsy Roberts and her mother for reasons that make no damn sense, and Stanley does his best to frustrate the Count’s efforts for no good reason either. People behave Very Stupidly Indeed, everyone immediately falls for the merest attempt at mendacity, and lots of protracted chasing seems to take place in the second half — I did a lot of skipping forward, so it’s difficult to know or care — and then we eventually get to the truth of the matter…and why no-one sought to reveal this sooner is a discontent I shall carry to my grave.

The sole interest is to be found in the depiction of Jack’s squalid living conditions, his post-military existence being very much a case of only just existing rather than being treated, as Masterman seems to suggest, with the respect that his efforts deserve:

The very words “old soldier” had resumed its pre-war meaning, a loafer, a sponger, a wastrel. The clever young managers and manageresses would have none of them, and for them there was no dole.

The occasional interesting character looms up out of the murk, such as the 14 year-old Betty who keeps house for Jack and is an excellent study of repressed understanding trying to function in a world that is well beyond her ken, but mostly this is pretty weak sauce. Scotland Yard man Arthur Sinclair follows events with the sort of avuncular good humour which marks him out, but despite claiming to know “the key of the whole mystery” before the halfway point we’re still subjected to lots of chases, lots of unlikely hiding and menacing and glitchy film stock, and so I’m laying the blame for the pointless loquacity of this at his feet.

God, I wish I could just read two competent Masterman books back to back, y’know? The guy shows such promise, but then he goes and writes a dated, meandering diegesis like this and it really kills my interest in most things. I did not enjoy dragging my way through this, and it left me so enervated that I’ve been unable to summon the enthusiasm to read anything in the two weeks since falling over its finish line. As such, I think I’m simply going to take August off from blogging, because, yeesh, this coming on the tail of a bunch of stuff that I can’t get too excited about is not good for one’s motivation. I can’t even be bothered to finish this review properly, because that would mean more time dwelling on The Nameless Crime — a nonsense title, by the way, the crime is manslaughter — and I just don’t want to do that any more.

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See also

Don D’Ammassa @ Critical Mass: Masterman is not a lost master of the mystery novel but some of his books are reasonably suspenseful and have interesting puzzles. Others do not. This is one of the latter.

Standalone: