REVIEW: Portrait of a Murderer
Portrait of a Murderer: Anne Meredith British Library 2017
Hmm, I’m now thinking I should stop this ‘tradition’ of reading Golden Age Christmas crime/murder stories written by women. Reading about a family that’s spending Christmas togcut>ether that’s so unhappy that one of them gets killed and there’s more than one suspect is an effective corrective to the burnishing of this idea that spending Christmas with the family is a utopia, which I’ve been unable to do twice because of the pandemic. But it’s not jolly fictional company. As Martin Edwards’s introduction states, this book is bleak, rather than cosy.
It’s different to your usual murder mystery, told in seven parts, all narratives, one first person, the others from a more omniscient point of view. You know it will be different from the opening line, which reveals who will be killed (violently) and by one of a smaller group of suspects than those around him who had a reason to want him dead. We very quickly learn who exactly the killer is, why and how, what they did to evade detection and point the evidence towards someone else, and how successful they were or weren’t. This involves spending some time in the killer’s mind, which I didn’t much enjoy, and I felt the writer and some of her characters went over the line in sympathising with his justifications, especially with one sacrilegiously misjudged comparison towards the final scenes.
I was also hung up from the first paragraph onwards as to whether the guilty party was a murderer per se, which in those days would have led to hanging, because the death, violent and instantaneous, was unpremeditated, and could have been described as manslaughter, but maybe that’s me trying to project my understanding of current legal niceties on the early 1930s when this is set.
There is no question that Adrian Gray, whose lifeless body is found on Christmas morning, is not much mourned by the family who had joined him for Christmas at Kings Poplar. Obsessed by money, status and certain proprieties, he has made the life of the some of his children a misery and narrowed the outlook of most of the rest. His two sons and the son-in-law who has been in charge of Gray’s investments are there for his money, which because of the rackety schemes osaid son-in-law, Eustace, Gray doesn’t have much of. Gray’s only single daughter, Amy, is his pinchpenny housekeeper, and because he set such a value on ‘respectability’ two of his children and at least one of his daughters-in-law are shackled in wedded misery. They are all staying under his roof.
As we meet this grim group, brought together as is tradition, the only contrast from the ambitious, venal, browbeaten and desperate are Ruth, the youngest of Gray’s daughters, and her husband Miles. He is a lawyer, who by living within his means and being diligent in both professional and domestic matters is content. But even these paragons of moral superiority have left their beloved children at home for Christmas, partly because they didn’t want to expose them to the poisonous atmosphere at Kings Poplar. Miles admits to his wife that he insisted they came this year, because he was worried by what the pressing need driving one of the party might drive them to. That disaster does occur, though it is only discovered after most of the family have eaten breakfast, later than the ‘murderer’ expected.
In one of the parts, a police sergeant with an interesting background and good training, turns up, but he soon leaves the story, having gathered the evidence left at the scene of the crime - Adrian Gray’s library - and from the testimony of the unhappy family party. We then follow only some family members - some characters who we had to learn minutely about in the opening parts depart - as they deal with the aftermath. The most likely suspect based on what is known, or thought to be known, is to face trial, and hanging for murder if found guilty. But chance brings Miles a series of clues that lead him to the unpalatable truth and justice, if he will make that truth known.
I didn’t warm as much to Ruth and Miles as I was supposed to. They’re child abandoners! (Also, Miles will later offer a teenager cigarettes!!) Olivia Moore, nee Gray, and her husband Eustace also don’t bring their children along, they’re holidaying in Switzerland, while black sheep of the family Brand (Hildebrand) has not brought either his wife or children, as Adrian Gray disapproved of the connection. Meanwhile, the oldest son Richard and his wife cannot have children. These absences and the suggestion of sterility they whisper are amplified by references to dead children: Adrian Gray’s son Phillip did not survive childhood, and the patriarch likes to imagine that he would be less grasping and disappointing than the living six; tragic Isobel’s only child, Honor, was killed, it is implied, because of the abuse of her rich husband, who her father will not let her divorce and who will not divorce her, although they are separated, with her existing at Kings Poplar at her husband’s expense; and Brand’s firstborn son, the chief reason he married slatternly Sophy, died young. He was perhaps the only person Brand ever loved, having been rejected by his father for daring to want to be an artist instead of a vicar. Brand dug his heels in, married and stuck to his slatternly wife (in both senses of the word), living in poverty and, worst of all for him,unable to paint.
It should also be noted that the book is anti-Semitic: both the characters and authorial voice put Eustace Moore’s dodgy financial dealings down to his Jewish ancestry. (And he is a piece of work, he not only ruined his father-in-law financially, but also several other, smaller investors, which his best sisters-in-law despise him for.)
It was mainly the women and children I felt sorry for: Isobel is a survivor of domestic abuse, Laura is trapped by the egos of two men. One is her ambitious, narrow-minded husband, Richard - who proves his stupidity by assuming his father died of natural causes and not being bludgeoned by the heavy object that was the only way he could have sustained the injury to his head - and the lover she’s got behind Richard’s back who wouldn’t marry her if she got divorced. I felt sorry for the children who weren’t with their parents at Christmas, some of whom would grow up with the knowledge that their father was a criminal. Brand is particularly callous about his children (it is implied the youngest is not biologically his), expecting his daughters to be as willing to prostitute themselves as their mother in a few years.
But these women and children are very much the supporting characters, it is the male characters who act. So, I read grimly on. The brief glimpses of some of the Gray children coming into their potential after the death of their dreadful father doesn’t really ameliorate the bleakness. Even the fact that justice is served doesn’t much cut it.
It’s formally different from a murder mystery - no puzzle, no detective, aiming to be a tragedy more than a thriller. Perhaps that is why the book seems to have disappeared after making a splash when it was first published. The author and her murderer failed to make their case that male greatness is beyond social responsibility - I’m too conventional minded! I think other modern day readers of this reprint would be put off by the anti Semitism and the language. There were a few words I ought to have checked up in the dictionary, but was too lazy to do so, while the forms sometimes used would probably feature ‘arch.’ beside them, denoting that they’ve dropped out of fashion. As I don’t have any more books like this in my ‘to read’ pile, I won’t be acquiring another Christmas-set murder mystery unless if the word ‘cosy’ is predominantly featured in the blurb. This entry was originally posted at https://feather-ghyll.dreamwidth.org/191007.html. Please comment wherever you prefer to.
Hmm, I’m now thinking I should stop this ‘tradition’ of reading Golden Age Christmas crime/murder stories written by women. Reading about a family that’s spending Christmas togcut>ether that’s so unhappy that one of them gets killed and there’s more than one suspect is an effective corrective to the burnishing of this idea that spending Christmas with the family is a utopia, which I’ve been unable to do twice because of the pandemic. But it’s not jolly fictional company. As Martin Edwards’s introduction states, this book is bleak, rather than cosy.
It’s different to your usual murder mystery, told in seven parts, all narratives, one first person, the others from a more omniscient point of view. You know it will be different from the opening line, which reveals who will be killed (violently) and by one of a smaller group of suspects than those around him who had a reason to want him dead. We very quickly learn who exactly the killer is, why and how, what they did to evade detection and point the evidence towards someone else, and how successful they were or weren’t. This involves spending some time in the killer’s mind, which I didn’t much enjoy, and I felt the writer and some of her characters went over the line in sympathising with his justifications, especially with one sacrilegiously misjudged comparison towards the final scenes.
I was also hung up from the first paragraph onwards as to whether the guilty party was a murderer per se, which in those days would have led to hanging, because the death, violent and instantaneous, was unpremeditated, and could have been described as manslaughter, but maybe that’s me trying to project my understanding of current legal niceties on the early 1930s when this is set.
There is no question that Adrian Gray, whose lifeless body is found on Christmas morning, is not much mourned by the family who had joined him for Christmas at Kings Poplar. Obsessed by money, status and certain proprieties, he has made the life of the some of his children a misery and narrowed the outlook of most of the rest. His two sons and the son-in-law who has been in charge of Gray’s investments are there for his money, which because of the rackety schemes osaid son-in-law, Eustace, Gray doesn’t have much of. Gray’s only single daughter, Amy, is his pinchpenny housekeeper, and because he set such a value on ‘respectability’ two of his children and at least one of his daughters-in-law are shackled in wedded misery. They are all staying under his roof.
As we meet this grim group, brought together as is tradition, the only contrast from the ambitious, venal, browbeaten and desperate are Ruth, the youngest of Gray’s daughters, and her husband Miles. He is a lawyer, who by living within his means and being diligent in both professional and domestic matters is content. But even these paragons of moral superiority have left their beloved children at home for Christmas, partly because they didn’t want to expose them to the poisonous atmosphere at Kings Poplar. Miles admits to his wife that he insisted they came this year, because he was worried by what the pressing need driving one of the party might drive them to. That disaster does occur, though it is only discovered after most of the family have eaten breakfast, later than the ‘murderer’ expected.
In one of the parts, a police sergeant with an interesting background and good training, turns up, but he soon leaves the story, having gathered the evidence left at the scene of the crime - Adrian Gray’s library - and from the testimony of the unhappy family party. We then follow only some family members - some characters who we had to learn minutely about in the opening parts depart - as they deal with the aftermath. The most likely suspect based on what is known, or thought to be known, is to face trial, and hanging for murder if found guilty. But chance brings Miles a series of clues that lead him to the unpalatable truth and justice, if he will make that truth known.
I didn’t warm as much to Ruth and Miles as I was supposed to. They’re child abandoners! (Also, Miles will later offer a teenager cigarettes!!) Olivia Moore, nee Gray, and her husband Eustace also don’t bring their children along, they’re holidaying in Switzerland, while black sheep of the family Brand (Hildebrand) has not brought either his wife or children, as Adrian Gray disapproved of the connection. Meanwhile, the oldest son Richard and his wife cannot have children. These absences and the suggestion of sterility they whisper are amplified by references to dead children: Adrian Gray’s son Phillip did not survive childhood, and the patriarch likes to imagine that he would be less grasping and disappointing than the living six; tragic Isobel’s only child, Honor, was killed, it is implied, because of the abuse of her rich husband, who her father will not let her divorce and who will not divorce her, although they are separated, with her existing at Kings Poplar at her husband’s expense; and Brand’s firstborn son, the chief reason he married slatternly Sophy, died young. He was perhaps the only person Brand ever loved, having been rejected by his father for daring to want to be an artist instead of a vicar. Brand dug his heels in, married and stuck to his slatternly wife (in both senses of the word), living in poverty and, worst of all for him,unable to paint.
It should also be noted that the book is anti-Semitic: both the characters and authorial voice put Eustace Moore’s dodgy financial dealings down to his Jewish ancestry. (And he is a piece of work, he not only ruined his father-in-law financially, but also several other, smaller investors, which his best sisters-in-law despise him for.)
It was mainly the women and children I felt sorry for: Isobel is a survivor of domestic abuse, Laura is trapped by the egos of two men. One is her ambitious, narrow-minded husband, Richard - who proves his stupidity by assuming his father died of natural causes and not being bludgeoned by the heavy object that was the only way he could have sustained the injury to his head - and the lover she’s got behind Richard’s back who wouldn’t marry her if she got divorced. I felt sorry for the children who weren’t with their parents at Christmas, some of whom would grow up with the knowledge that their father was a criminal. Brand is particularly callous about his children (it is implied the youngest is not biologically his), expecting his daughters to be as willing to prostitute themselves as their mother in a few years.
But these women and children are very much the supporting characters, it is the male characters who act. So, I read grimly on. The brief glimpses of some of the Gray children coming into their potential after the death of their dreadful father doesn’t really ameliorate the bleakness. Even the fact that justice is served doesn’t much cut it.
It’s formally different from a murder mystery - no puzzle, no detective, aiming to be a tragedy more than a thriller. Perhaps that is why the book seems to have disappeared after making a splash when it was first published. The author and her murderer failed to make their case that male greatness is beyond social responsibility - I’m too conventional minded! I think other modern day readers of this reprint would be put off by the anti Semitism and the language. There were a few words I ought to have checked up in the dictionary, but was too lazy to do so, while the forms sometimes used would probably feature ‘arch.’ beside them, denoting that they’ve dropped out of fashion. As I don’t have any more books like this in my ‘to read’ pile, I won’t be acquiring another Christmas-set murder mystery unless if the word ‘cosy’ is predominantly featured in the blurb. This entry was originally posted at https://feather-ghyll.dreamwidth.org/191007.html. Please comment wherever you prefer to.