The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler

I’m having a crime sort of moment. Generally I like my crime novels Holmsian and relatively bloodless. Country House murders of the cyanide and tea variety are the kind of thing I like. I enjoy the puzzle of a good mystery but serial killers give me nightmares.

The Mask of Dimitrios is almost an attack on those kind of country house murders. It derides them as essentially unreal. Belonging to the same fictional, civilised England as Bertie Wooster.

The protagonist is the writer of exactly those types of novels. Don’t writers love writing about writers? Two out of three books I read this week dealt in novelists and it was purely coincidence. Whoever said writing was masturbatory narcissism had a point.

Anyway he is drawn into the world of genuine criminal types. It’s all pretty post war and bleak. People act out of rational self interest and people end up dead. The most positive emotion depicted is detached curiosity. People are not nice, they screw each other over as a matter of convenience.

Still it’s not at all bad. It could have done with a less obvious twist in my opinion but maybe it wasn’t really meant to come as a surprise.