A review of Somebody at the Door by Raymond Postgate – 240115

Sometimes when surfing the world wide web it is possible to go down so many rabbit holes that you forget what it was you were initially trying to find out. I got this feeling as I read Raymond Postgate’s Somebody at the Door, originally published in 1943 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, the first of two books in his Inspector Holly series. The book has an unusual structure which makes it feel like a collection of short stories book ended by a Murder mystery.

The story starts off promisingly enough with a train journey. A carriage allows the author to assemble a collection of characters who would otherwise be unlikely to be together but in Postgate’s case at least five of the other nine passengers in the compartment in which Henry Grayling is travelling not only know him but have reasons to hate him. According to his wife, Renata, after getting off the train, Grayling arrives home later than he is accustomed to in a distressed state, collapses, she takes him first into the kitchen to see what is the matter with him and then to bed, before summoning the doctor and the vicar. Grayling dies shortly afterwards and after a post mortem it is established that he died from inhaling mustard gas.

The questions that Inspector Holly has to determine is how the mustard gas was administered, when and by whom and whether the empty attache case found near his house in which he was carrying his firm’s wages had anything to do with the attack. His working assumption was that the mustard gas was administered in the railway compartment, a theory supported by the fact that the two sitting nearest to Grayling, Charles Evetts and the vicar, had symptoms suggestive of being in close proximity to mustard gas.

In pursuing his enquiries, Holly, a dour, meticulous and not overly bright man, unearths the backstories of the prime suspects and the reasons for their animus towards Grayling. The vicar suspects that Grayling is only a churchwarden for the societal position rather than through any commitment to the Christian faith and, more importantly, in his role as a Councillor has been on the take, something the Vicar was going to expose when the time is right. Holly, though, cannot believe that a vicar would commit a murder.

Charles Evetts, who works for the same firm as Grayling, had been caught by him for stealing some chemicals to induce his girlfriend’s abortion, a procedure from which she subsequently dies, and has been blackmailed by a fellow employee. That he is anxious to serve King and country is, in Holly’s eyes, to his favour rather than a cause for suspicion. Ransom in the same Home Guard unit as Grayling has been humiliated by him over the use of gases. Then there is a German, Mannheim, probably refugee but who has been denounced by Grayling as either a Nazi or a sympathiser.

The story behind Mannheim’s arrival in England is a novella in its own right, a tale of how some earnest British socialists uncover a plot to hand over refugees seeking passage to safety to the Nazi authorities. In pursuing the case, one of them pays with his life. Frankly, this is the most interesting part of the book and there is more active investigation and deduction than is exhibited in solving the Grayling murder. The final suspect is Hugh Rolandson who is having an affair with Renata, which Grayling has rumbled and is threatening to expose with the consequence that he, Rolandson, and Renata will be ruined.        

Only at the end does Holly work out that he has been on completely the wrong track from the start and a fresh examination of the suspects and their possible motives reveals another solution. This is a murder that probably could not have been committed other than in wartime. Several of the suspects have access to and been trained in the use of poison gases and the blackout means that lighting is at best dim and in rooms where there is no blind impossible to switch on.

Postgate treats the denouement rather brusquely, as though Grayling’s murder was only a plot device to allow him to explore the more interesting backstories. It gave the book a very disjointed feel, but there are some interesting episodes and he captures the wartime atmosphere well.