UBC: Fox, White Mischief

[truepenny]

White Mischief: The Murder of Lord Erroll by James Fox

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

All English country house mysteries are really set in Kenya between WWI & WWII. It is exactly that bonkers hot-house atmosphere where no affectation is too extreme, no level of snobbery too great. Everybody knows everybody else; life revolves around the club; servants are silent and self-effacing and know better to have opinions about anything. There's a sort of uncanny valley in reading about the murder of Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll and High Constable of Scotland, where I kept getting yanked up short by, No, the author COULDN'T have done a better job with this character, because he was a real person and his unsatisfactoriness is historical. It all seems so artificial and implausible--but the artifice is created, not by an author, but by the characters themselves. (It doesn't help that I kept thinking of Sheri S. Tepper's brilliant Grass, either.)

The book has one of my favorite structures: an investigator many years later trying to hunt down the truth about a murder, teasing bits of it out of surviving witnesses, tracking down leads in documents, experiencing horripilating moments of serendipity. Fox's narrative is even a matryoshka doll of investigations, because in 1982 he's re-investigating the work he did with Cyril Connolly in investigating, in 1969, a murder that took place in 1941. I don't think he's quite good enough as a writer to pull the thing off as the tour de force it ought to be, so the characters stay rather jumbled and it's hard to pick out where the moments of epiphany should hit like blows. Even the one at the end, when Fox discovers that the witness who knows who murdered Erroll was someone Connolly talked to in 1969 and just didn't push quite hard enough, he mutes a little, mumbles a little. Form mirrors content; Fox seems determined to maintain an atmosphere of well-bred reticence even when he's dragging ugly festering truth out into the light of day--and even when it's brutally apparent that there was nothing "well-bred" about the behavior of the victim, the murderer, or any of the suspects.

Fascinating, even if not 100% successful.



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