In Sybille Bedford’s book, Jigsaw, a woman who is suffering from insomnia asks for books. ‘Oh, not real books, I couldn’t look at those. Detective stories only.’ So Sayers’ Wimseyland and Christie’s Poirot are required. How would she get on today? Ruth Rendell and P. D James would do excellently but none of these books would do at all: they are all thrillers, packed with blood, murder and mayhem, a nightmare diet. No time for quiet little grey cells to be working away here. Charles Maclean’s Home Before Dark is a particularly disturbing example of the genre.
When Sophie Lister, an American girl studying in Florence, is brutally murdered, Superintendent Morelli believes the murderer got into her life by computer, but after a year he has made no progress. Her father, Ed, exasperated by the delay and a rich man who can make money talk very loud, comes over from the States. After Samantha (‘Sam’), his daughter’s close friend, tells him that Sophie has a sinister website address, homebeforedark.com on her files, Ed offers a computer expert called Campbell Armour a million dollars to find the killer. What Sam didn’t tell Ed was that his daughter knew a man called Ward and had she done so she might not have been murdered herself a day or two later.
This is not a whodunnit: we know from the outset that the killer is Ward. The book is a menacing chase and a gruesome case history. It starts with Sam’s information, but goes cold when Ward kills her on a train. Though Ed Lister doesn’t know it, he has already met Ward. At the gardens where his daughter was murdered, as he stands looking at where the chalk outline of her body had been made by the police he senses he’s being watched.
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