A review of The Murder of Eve by Moray Dalton – 230831

Aficionados of Moray Dalton, the nom de plume of Katherine Dalton Renoir, have grown to expect her to explore the darker or seedier side of human existence and she does not disappoint with The Murder of Eve, a story that does not feature her series detective, High Collier, and was originally published in 1945 and recently reissued by Dean Street Press. A cosy murder mystery it is not and it is barely a murder mystery and much more of a thriller which takes as one of its central themes the white slave trade, a subject more associated with sensationalist penny dreadfuls.

According to Curtis Evans’ informative afterword, “throughout the 1920s and 1930s crime thrillers and more respectable detective stories employed white slavery as a plot device, while true crime magazines ran lurid stories about it”. Early 20^th century court cases established that the Camorra, a shady Italian criminal network based around Naples, akin to the Sicilian-based Mafia, were involved in the practice of kidnapping young girls and women and sending them as sexual slaves to South America.

Dalton is a late arrival to the subject, but in her hands, she eschews the sensationalist and crafts a tragedy that is both enthralling and profoundly sad. It is rare for me to be moved by a piece of crime fiction, but I was when I had finished this story. There is no happy ever after, no spring of hope to hold on to. Set primarily in the Italy of 1905 and written as the Second World War drew to a close, it is tempting to wonder whether this lyrical love letter to an idyllic Italy that once was owes its darker side to Dalton’s regret that the two countries found themselves on opposing sides as Italy elected to follow the path to Fascism and that the aspirations espoused by some of her characters that Anglo-Italian friendships would endure forever were so quickly and cruelly dashed at great cost.

The other theme that struck me is of lives wasted, not least that of Roger Fordyce, who willingly went to Italy to track down the whereabouts of a young girl he did not know and perished in the process. It is hard not to think that this is a reflection of all the lives, filled with earnest endeavour to fight the evils of Nazism only to die for a greater cause, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori and all that, and leaving relatives to mourn their loss.

The body count is high and the mission to discover what happened to Anne Gale, the daughter of Roger, who disappeared after finding out about her father’s second marriage and was last heard of going to Sant Andrina to find her mother, the artist and eponymous Eve, only to find she is not there, is a poisoned chalice. Both her parents are murdered during the course of the book, Lily Oram, who lived in the block of flats where Roger’s body was found after allegedly falling down a lift shaft, is drugged, abducted, and rescued from the hands of the slavers, and de Sanctis has to move his family from Rome to Leith to escape the revenge of the Camorra. Only Ronald Guthrie, the British vice-consul, escapes the tragedy unscathed.       

To give Dalton her due, her bloodbath also ensnares the baddies with the mastermind behind the operation suffering a gruesome death, symbolically, if a little loosely, at the hands of his virginal daughter. A sketch by Eve, which gives Roger the clue as to where she might be, is poignantly and wastefully lost as the narrative jumps to 1940 for the story’s epilogue.  

The important takeaway from the story is never be a forgetful correspondent, especially if you have some important news to relate. It saves a lot of trouble in the end.

This is an impressive novel that is thought provoking and work on many levels, as well as being gripping and a page turner. Moray Dalton is an impressive writer, and I am grateful to the team at Dean Street Press for rescuing it from unmerited obscurity.