Dear diary, I must kill her
THE MURDER OF MY AUNT by Richard Hull (British Library £8.99)
A NEW entry into the British Library Crime Classics series, Richard Hull strikes a resounding note of originality. Not for him the amateur sleuth and dogged police officer.
Instead, we have a battle of wits to the death between two selfish, vindictive characters, an elderly woman with an acid tongue and her indolent, financially dependent nephew.
Living in daily disharmony in their Welsh hillside home, the story unfolds in the nephew’s diary, in which he recounts the humiliations piled upon him — and reveals his plan for coming into his inheritance by polishing off his troublesome relative.
But, despite tampering with the brakes of her car, starting a fire and administering poison, the old lady stays one jump ahead. Or does she?
Hull keeps us guessing. This was his first novel — originally published in 1934 — and the start of a prolific writing career.
THE HIGH WINDOW by Raymond Chandler (Penguin £8.99)
THERE are moments in The High Window when one has to pause to savour what one’s just read.
Raymond Chandler is the master of striking images, as with his descriptions of a bar girl, who had ‘enough clothes to hide behind a toothpick’, and of a lift operator who ‘looked as if he had been sitting there since the Civil War and had come out of that badly’.
Chandler’s cool private eye Philip Marlowe is in pursuit of a rare gold coin. His client, a liquor-soaked old sourpuss, chooses to believe that her daughter-in-law has stolen it from the family collection.
Marlowe thinks there is more to it. So, too, do the police, who give Marlowe as much trouble as the lowest of low-life Los Angeles.
With his economy of style that matches perfectly a sharp-edged story, Chandler has few rivals.
THE THIRD MAN AND OTHER STORIES by Graham Greene (Macmillan Collector’s Library £9.99)
THE Third Man was never intended for publication. Graham Greene saw it more as a working document for his screenplay for what was to become one of the best ever British movies.
Inevitably, it’s the comparison between page and screen that is intriguing.
All the big scenes are Greene’s creation — the apparently deceased Harry Lime glimpsed in the shadows, the meeting on the big wheel, the chase through the sewers — along with the indelible images of post-war Vienna, where racketeers hold power over a decaying city.
There is one big difference. Director Carol Reed insisted on changing the ending. For the sake of the uninitiated, I will refrain from giving it away.
In this reissue of one of Greene’s best novellas, The Third Man comes with a clutch of his short stories that turn on the recurring theme of coping with the guilt that comes with conflicting loyalties.