Someone from the Past by Margot Bennett

Someone from the Past by Margot Bennett

published 1958

[excerpts]

I took the lace nylon slip, it was white. The pants and girdle that lay underneath it were pale blue. I took the brassière last; it was yellow. I stood holding them all, and worrying and worrying. The clothes were wrong.

 

I had to get my mind steady. I began again to think about the underclothes. She preferred green, and pale yellow… I began to look methodically for a pale blue slip to match the pants and girdle, and suddenly a coloured picture appeared, of Sarah, wearing a green dressing-gown, answering the door to Donald. I had no idea of being a detective, it wasn’t why I was there, the police would attend to all that. I’m not sure why I was so determined to find out about the underclothes. I suppose as usual, even in these circumstances, I was carried on by curiosity. I went through every drawer, every possible place, even the laundry box in the bathroom, but there was no pale-blue slip anywhere. There were plenty of white pants and girdles and brassières: she could have matched everything in white.

 

comments: Margot Bennett is a subject of much fascination among crime fiction fans. She wrote three really good interesting books: The Widow of Bath, The Man Who Didn’t Fly, and this one, Someone From the Past. They all had strikingly unusual, innovative features and were very well-written. And then she just stopped: she worked in TV, and wrote some other books, including non-fiction such as the The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Atomic Radiation (which sounds like the kind of title a crime book would have now: use your death ray to kill your errant partner). But wrote no more crime – a real shame.

Chrissie Poulson recommended this one to me for the clothes detection as above, and indeed the clothes matter. The plot was strong(ish), but it was the picture of a certain kind of London life that was absolutely riveting, the thing I most enjoyed. Two young women on the make, Sarah and Nancy, shared a flat a few years before the book opens. They both came from unremarkable backgrounds, and were both determined to get on in life, doing whatever was necessary.

If a poor girl has the advantage of beauty, she has to use it early. She can go in the chorus at sixteen; or win a beauty competition at eighteen; or train as a photographic model and work up to the pinnacle of displaying clothes for other women to buy. She may even become a starlet. But, like rugby footballers and professional boxers, beauty has a short career. At twenty-eight or so, it ends. Who wins a beauty competition at thirty? Who is a top model, or even an air hostess, at thirty-five? There’s nothing much left, then, but to marry into the directory of directors. It’s a short summer; if you want to pick the flowers you have to dig hard in the right season.

They are tough, and absurd, and touching: they are forever trying to improve their social skills: ‘learning how to walk, and sit, and dress, and catch the eye of the camera.’ They feel they need to learn to ride horses…

They have gone their separate ways, but meet by chance, and Sarah tells Nancy she has been receiving threatening letters – anonymous but plainly from a former lover.

Sarah is murdered, and Nancy’s current boyfriend might be in the frame. So Nancy spends the next 200 pages alternating between being brave and investigating, and acting as a total idiot (covering up, lying to police, putting herself in danger). You do quite want to strangle her sometimes (the next victim!) but the story rattles along very nicely indeed as she meets up with Sarah’s ex-lovers to try to find out who it was.

And I was struck by how very unusual these protagonists were: competent (mostly) young women living their life their way.

It reminded me somewhat of the lives of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, the (real life) young women caught up in the Profumo Affair. Keeler moved to London, aged 16, at the time the book was written, hit the headlines a couple of years later, and did not have an enviable life. It also had some elements in common with Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl, a book I loved.

But Nancy is different, not driven like Hornby’s Barbara, but does better than Christine Keeler:  not the kind of character who appears in crime stories, or novels generally, as just a straightforward person: she is not defined as a victim or a tart or someone looking desperately for love.  

The relationships with men are unusual and sometimes unconventional, but very convincing with real-sounding dialogue. Nancy goes round the old boyfriends, each of whom thinks a different one did it. It adds to the interest of the book, and also means that if you think Nancy will end up with one of them – well, no certainty as to which, keeping everyone’s options open. Though, annoyingly, there is a lot too much of women doing stuff for men – cleaning, cooking -  and its being assumed and accepted by both sides. Of course this was of its time, but Margot Bennett sometimes seemed to be better than that.

I couldn’t quite parse this: 

She was wearing some kind of yellow coat that matched her hair. She looked like the prize the third son gets for being kind to a rabbit.

… but it was pleasing all the same.

The poems of C Day Lewis turn up in the book – he has appeared on the blog often as crime writer Nicholas Blake, and I had been thinking about his poems recently because of recent blog obsession Rosamond Lehmann.

Bennett writes very entertainingly - I loved this:

I wanted to sit still and think, but Mike wouldn’t let me. What he wanted was to lick out all my thoughts, like an ant-eater.

A startling and unexpected image, but you know just what she means.

I don’t know if this is true, but it is a great thought:

Sarah was convinced she knew a real diamond when she saw it, and I believed I could tell paste at a glance. ‘There’s not much difference,’ I told her. ‘Diamonds shine in the dark. Paste doesn’t.’

Both the women were real diamonds…

Photos clover vintage

And again Clover vintage