The Riverside Villas Murder by Kingsley Amis

 

The Riverside Villas Murder by Kingsley Amis

published by 1973, set in 1936

 

Kingsley Amis was a big fan of detective fiction, as well as a close friend of Edmund Crispin, and it certainly shows in this book, which is full of references to, and set in, the Golden Age of mystery books.

It is a pastiche/hommage, and at the same time a bildungsroman, a book about a young boy growing up and discovering women. The main character is Peter Furneaux, a 14 year old schoolboy – as Amis would have been at the time of the book’s setting (1936 - never explicitly stated, but discoverable by a couple of references to events in the news). He lives in a suburban house, part of the eponymous row of villas, and he knows the neighbours well. He’s a clever schoolboy, and he and his friend are fairly obsessed with sex.

There is a tennis club dance, during which Inman, a miserable, low-rent journalist, gets drunk and tells various local worthies that he knows their secrets and is ready to reveal them. A couple of days later he staggers through the French windows into Peter’s living-room, badly injured and sopping wet, and dies on the carpet. A very proper traditional setup.

Quite a few scenes are done from the POV of the investigating policemen – something I had forgotten, I think most readers become convinced that the story is entirely Peter’s.

At the beginning of the book, the author suggests “Those who wish to pit their wits against the author’s and solve the mystery for themselves are advised to study pages 61, 82 and 160”. For various reasons I am convinced that this para was carried wholesale from a different edition, and the page numbers do not work in my copy.  But again, a reference to traditional GA books. It is hard to say which is more annoying about my edition – this failure in the hints area, or the absolutely terrible cover, truly horrendous:

There is also a lot of heavy-handed mentioning of John Dickson Carr’s classic The Hollow Man, with quotations. (For many people a favourite among Carr’s books, though it is by no means mine). There are also references to the real-life Wallace case (with extended discussion of the key phonecall) and other true crime.

Amis always has a light touch, and there are some nice lines:

The colonel turned on him a face like Death at his most winning and informal.

Peter thanks someone for ‘a sawney tea’, something he really enjoyed, and while context makes it clear what this must mean, I wasn’t able to track down any such definition – sawney has various usages (including a cannibal Scotsman and a simpleton) but not what would be required here.

A young woman in the book, Daphne, is reading The Constant Nymph, Margaret Kennedy’s masterpiece. I have for years been collecting references to this book in popular culture – it turns up amazingly often. (It is a great blog favourite, and other posts on it can by found via the tag.)

I remember saying about this book in the past  ‘it seems to give a very convincing picture of 1930s suburbia, and more than I wanted to know about young men’s habits’. You would assume that Amis had a very good memory, that he really worked at making a convincing background, and that his 14yo was as real as he could make him. And this did make me laugh.

It crossed Peter’s mind that to be seduced on successive afternoons by a solicitor’s wife and a retired Army officer would be a stupendous double first, a left-and-right that would make him the undisputed sexual king of Blackfriars Grammar, a legend in his own lifetime….

 

I always have a love-hate relationship with Amis – so good when he was on form, so annoying when he misses. This one comes somewhere in the middle: light and very readable, with some aspects very much of its time. As a crime novel, it is average… but it is a very interesting one-off.

I have featured on the blog two Amis books I really love – Lucky Jim, and The Old Devils (very pleased with the post title History Boyos). I also enjoyed The Folks That Live on the Hill.

And also, Amis’s James Bond companion was helpful to the point of being essential (I said at the time that it contained ‘helpful verdicts such as ‘M at his most unspeakable’ and ‘masterly handling of implausible material’ and motive for the crime in the book is ‘just luxuriating in villainy, really’’) when I read through the entire Bond/Fleming oeuvre a few years ago – roundup post with links here.

Group around the bar, and smooth man and two smooth women, cheery couple stepping out – all from the State Library of New South Wales. They are the right date, even if from the other side of the world. All are by the wonderful Sam Hood, whose collection of everyday newspaper photos of the era is such an incredible resource for the likes of me.