I’m doing Roger Ormerod a slight disservice here, by lumping him into this tranche of Mining Mount TBR. See, this series is an initiative by which I get to finally scrape books off my TBR that have been clinging there for arguably too long, and Ormerod has been so entertaining thus far that I was always going to read more by him. So wherefore his involvement here?

Put simply, two of the three books already featured this month were not good, and I have since picked up and then cast aside another two titles that I’ve been hanging onto for aaaages…and, honestly, I think I need to start trusting my instincts more and just getting rid of books when I can find no enthusiasm to read them. So, in a blatant attempt to finish the undertaking on a high this month, and to finally read a book that stands a chance of being good, I turn to Ormerod and the highly-praised Face Value, a.k.a. The Hanging Doll Murder (1983).

Three days away from retirement — uh-oh! — Detective Inspector Richard Patton is trying to keep a low profile, keen to avoid anything he can’t finish up in the time that remains to him.

The thought of walking away with an important and absorbing case pounding in my brain, and never to be resolved, was appalling. So I’d begun a paltry dabbling into minor matters, which I should have handed to a DC, not letting myself care too much, and not offering any imagination in case the unusual or the bizarre offered back.

Fate, though, has other plans, and three cases will present themselves in such quick succession that they can’t help but be linked: a burnt out car in a copse, the theft of a shotgun, and the discovery in an abandoned cottage of a body with its face and hands removed via the expedient of a shotgun blast or two. To cap it all off, the woman who reported the car missing proves to be a rather enticing proposition to the recently-widowed Patton, and as he gets closer to her it seems that several others within the police are increasingly convinced she’s guilty of something.

Ormerod is an interesting writer — and, I can’t help but feel, a largely forgotten one despite the size of his output — because he falls between so many stools. Face Value wants to be a puzzle plot, but also wants to be an examination of psychology or something, as well as being a look at modern policing, plus a sort of rogue-on-the-loose policeman story that was probably popular at the end of the 1970s. In trying to be everything, it ends up not quite convincing as any of them, giving insufficient time to the puzzle elements and then rushing the character piece as Patton and Amelia Trowbridge sort of maybe fall for each other in a way that would definitely get you struck off and yet doesn’t really feel convincing for all the time given to it (they call each other “dear” a lot, and it’s not as convincing as Ormerod seems to think).

Some of what’s here is great — the, er, circumstances that brought Amelia to the region and how they unavoidably drive a wedge between the two is a genius piece of plotting that you really do feel would be ruinous to the hopes these people might have for a future together, and the examination of how being a policeman impacts Patton’s private life (“Always I was a copper. How long did I have to go before I became an ordinary human being?”) is well-examined. The puzzle of the dead body is a good one, too: why was there a shotgun braced against the wall, both barrels having been fired? How to explain the broken window? And Patton has a built-in weariness that feels like a man who is coming to the end of his rope.

I treated him to my best smile. I’m told it frightens people.

Elsewhere, though, we run into problems that I feel are going to be a recurring theme with Ormerod. The writing is weird, like no-one edited this before publication (“He was addicted to Americanisms,” we’re told of Patton’s boss, Chief Superintendent Merridew, who is in about half the book and uses a single Americanism just that once), and, while Patton is the first to admit that he’s slowing down mentally, this mainly seems to be an excuse to hold off some fairly obvious conclusions until the closing stages of the book where they’ll be more dramatic as chapter closers. Also, as to the promise of a “locked and fastened cottage, into which nobody could have entered, and nobody left” — there’s, like, an obvious hole in one of the windows that would enable exactly that.

In trying to appeal to several genre-types at once, the book ends up oddly paced — the final three chapters are frankly hard work to dig through, despite that being the time that everything is coming to a head — making it too long, and difficult to know quite what its focus is. I also, in another recurring aspect of Ormerod’s writing, really don’t quite know how Patton came to the conclusions he did, and can’t help but wish that less time was given to him being awkward over cups of tea and more spent investigating the, like, murder that was in the title.

I won’t deny, though, that the final solution is very clever, and almost worth the effort. I don’t believe it in the least — there’s a rather key, er, happening that we’re told took “five hours” and, I dunno, I just think it’s not quite good enough to prop up a novel of this length. Put it at the end of a 15-page short story and I’d champion it as a masterpiece, but for all the undeniable cleverness on display here — Ormerod has a wonderful way of making tiny details matter, like the true greats of the Golden Age — I wasn’t quite convinced that it would all come off as it did.

My third read by Ormerod, Face Value certainly hasn’t put me off reading further, but it leaves me fairly convinced that the flaws I see in him — odd little narrative tics that go nowhere, a difficulty picking which of the fences within the crime fiction genre he’s going to sit between resulting in books which lack clarity in their purpose and so result in flaccidly-paced revelations — are going to be omnipresent in his work. And I guess I can live with that going forward, now I know to expect them; I just wish someone had sat down with him and ironed them out so that he was someone I could be more excited by all these years later.

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See also

TomCat @ Beneath the Stains of Time: [T]he irresistible comparison between Face Value and the Japanese shin honkaku movement is perhaps not so strange as they share the same quality: a clear and sound understanding of what makes a proper detective story tick and getting the people who devour them.