The Devil and the C I D - E C R Lorac

 Another E C R Lorac – and this is the point at which it occurs to me that I’m very likely going to end up reading all her books and it would have been neater, for the purpose of this blog, to begin at book one.

That said, a writer’s first book is rarely their best, and I might not have been tempted to carry on. 

The other problem is that I hadn’t even heard of Lorac before I picked up Fire in the Thatch, and later Murder by Matchlight and Bats in the Belfry, all republished in the British Library Crime Classics series. This of course is the point of the BLCCs, and the strand is so successful and vast by now that there must surely be something to suit everyone’s taste, provided they have any taste for crime at all. The trick is finding it.

In my case that has mostly been George Bellairs and E C R Lorac – so far.

Hence my seeking out the not yet published. I read The Devil and the C I D over two sittings in one of the British Library Reading Rooms (Humanities 2), ordered alongside Detective Stories from the Strand, which I haven’t finished yet but mean to blog about here when I do. The intro alone is fascinating. 

But I digress.   

The Devil and the C I D is one of the Macdonald books, and begins with our hero crawling along the embankment in a fog on Armistice Night in the late 30s. 

My first surprise was that unlike Remembrance Day, which I would have assumed it resembled greatly, Armistice Night – twenty years or thereabouts after the end of what was then known as the Great War – was apparently the excuse for a big party. Macdonald is not only contending with the fog and the rest of the traffic but crowds of revellers in fancy dress and a young woman who has lost her sense of direction completely and had her bag snatched. 

I really enjoy these unselfconscious bits of local colour. You get a great sense of how driving a car in those days did not mean being closed in a box away from pedestrians like it would now, and the disorientation where you can’t even see the edge of the kerb.

Eventually of course Macdonald gets to Scotland Yard and parks up with a sigh of relief.

Only to find next morning that during the few minutes he was out of the car assisting the young lady (delivered safely back to her aunt and never mentioned again) someone left a dead body in it, and he has unwittingly driven it all the way to the Yard to be locked in overnight. 

Sheer cheek on the behalf of the murderer? Or did they get the wrong car in the fog?

I’m going to get the obvious out of the way – characters and on occasion author use ‘the language of the time’ repeatedly. The book is an uneasy hodgepodge of conscious rejection of prejudice and repeated stereotyping along the lines of race. The Italian is hysterical. Our half-Chinese heroine Charley is inevitably described as inscrutable (code for not fainting about the place like the British one, I suppose) and it would take too long to enumerate all the rest. But there are also sensible and surprising discussions about the police between Charley and an ex-suffragette, and a nice awareness from Macdonald that he needs to guard against assuming Catholics are less reliable. 

But I'm meant to be talking about the mystery, and unfortunately I can’t do that without spoilers so PLEASE NOTE SPOILERS BELOW. 

Although not for the murderer. I’m not a monster.

 

 

 

 

SPOILERS 

My first and major beef with this book is that I dislike MacGuffins. I particularly dislike ones that turn up within a few chapters of the end and in the form of a diamond that our hysterical Italian ex opera singer once gave to a lady and now wants to buy back because he believes it confers immortality (instead she has given it to our corpse - pre-corpsehood, obviously - to fund Franco’s war in Spain). 

I also didn’t believe in the bit of paper stuck to another car in that fog, which was supposedly there to throw suspicion on the retired opera singer (because the corpse was meant to be left in his car and the killer realised his mistake). 

Firstly, unless the killer is incredibly stupid he would surely realise that’s not at all the same as leaving the dead body in the car, and would only make the police think someone (i.e. the real murderer) wanted to direct their attention that way. Otherwise, who is supposed to have left it? The owner of the car? The chauffeur? the dead man? 

On top of that, why is the note written in such an oblique way – a bit of Milton and a bar or two of Faust?  And lastly, given the fog, where was our killer that he managed to first put the body in the wrong car, then realise, write this note and pin it to the right car afterwards? Would he not have faded out the moment he knew his murder was successful?

So in summary – local colour good, characters an intriguing mix of four and one dimensional, quite a lot of humour - but mystery a no go.

SPOILERS END

 

I do still want to read more Lorac though, so in the spirit of still reading out of order the next one I intend to tackle is A Pall for a Painter, which comes before this one and was also published two years before Marsh’s Artists in Crime, with which I suspect there will be comparisons.