The Colour of Murder

December 1, 2018
A shy, frustrated London husband's infatuation with another woman ends in murder in this reprint of a 1957 book, which won the Crime Writers Association Best Novel award on its first publication.John Wilkins isn't looking for an affair. He's not looking for much of anything at all: not acceptance of his proposal to merge the Palings department store's Complaints Department, where he works, with its Service Department; not the raise he assures his standoffish wife, May, he's going to get one of these days; not even May's demonstrated affection. But once he meets librarian Sheila Morton, an equally harmless soul who pretends greater interest in him than she actually feels, he can't help fantasizing about her and their future together, and the periodic blackouts he's suffered for several years become more frequent, more severe, and more troubling. When Sheila announces that she's taking a vacation in Brighton, Wilkins talks May into booking a stay at a hotel a few blocks away, and it's in Brighton that matters come to a head, setting up a long confession Wilkins makes to a sympathetic psychotherapist and an equally long trial for murder. To say more would spoil the surprises planted by Symons (Playing Happy Families, 1994, etc.), whose love/hate relationship with the tropes of the classic British mystery continued throughout his long career. This time, he achieves perhaps his most successful melding of sociological analysis, golden-age whodunit tropes, and darkly satirical sendups of the very conventions he relies on to structure this unexpectedly moving tale of a deeply ordinary man all too easily moved.This perfect choice for Poisoned Pen's British Library Crime Classics series wears its 60 years with surprising lightness. Now how about some Henry Wade?

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Starred review from December 15, 2018
The latest reissue in the British Library's Crime Classics series comes from a writer long acknowledged as a trailblazer in psychological suspense. Symons wrote more than 30 novels and won multiple Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America. This title, first published in 1957, was voted best crime novel of the year by the UK's Crime Writers' Association. It centers on the psyche of one very unhappily married, unhappily employed London resident, John Wilkins, who meets and falls in love with a local librarian. We gain our first knowledge of Wilkins' mind in the opening section, Before, through a series of letters he writes to a consulting psychiatrist (the first tingle of suspense comes from not knowing why he's been ordered to do this). The fact that Wilkins writes that he sometimes suffers from blackouts complicates both his and our knowledge of what he may have done. Part two, After, switches gears, with Wilkins on trial for committing a heinous murder on Brighton beach. The suspense is heightened by our not knowing until a good way into the novel who the murder victim is (novelist Martin Edwards, in his fascinating introduction, calls this technique a throwback to the whowasdunin fashion in Golden Age mysteries). Symons keeps readers on their toes with his unreliable narrator and numerous misdirections, but he amply rewards us with a story that makes us think. A very welcome reissue.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)