Murder Must Appetize by H. R. F. Keating

Author:H. R. F. Keating
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Murder Must Appetize
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1975-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

Undertones of war

But this is how, tirelessly defying a ridiculed law for all the world like so many pot-smokers of today, the rich lived, unexceptionable clubmen and gentlemen of private fortune. And, of course, officers. For, though these books were written on the eve of the 1939-45 War, traces linger by the score of the perhaps more tragic affair of 1914-18. A war record was a handy way of making the reader believe, as truth or red herring, that a character was a goodie or baddie or of showing the hidden bravery beneath the placid exterior of solicitor or don. Not a little, too, of the Army hierarchy survived in chance comparisons like ‘the inevitable sense of constraint the presence of a commanding officer entails’.

Yet World War II, for. all that our writers plainly did not intend to thrust unpleasantnesses at us, cast its shadow before. ‘Dictator’ is a word to be found here, there and everywhere like self-sown forget-me-nots in easy-going gardens. The leader of a gang in Nicholas Blake’s prep school is dubbed the ‘Dictator’. Anthony Gilbert makes a reference, casual as the phrase ‘common as Dalmation dogs in town’, to arrangements being made by a private secretary (another!) ‘as efficient as a dictator’. And when, in Death Is No Sportsman, papers mapping out a business merger enter the plot the parties are said to have been moving ‘with all the mutual distrust of two dictators engaged in forming a new “axis”.’

Every now and again, too, the catastrophe ahead is cheerfully used to provide a mainspring for the action or, more usually, as a nice red herring. But in principle spies were, as one of the characters in Hamlet, Revenge remarks to the detective-story writer, ‘a species of excitement your austere art sniffs at’. Sniff we certainly did. Eric Ambler was almost as ‘common’ in our snob-clouded eyes as the Americans, and despised they were for all that writers such as Ellery Queen were producing, in American settings, books almost precisely similar to the ones we wallowed in. But it was simply not done to read them, which meant that read they were, although nobody ever boasted about it.

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