Officers, if not gentlemen

The execution for desertion of a young officer during the first world war goes disastrously wrong. What exactly happened? Who was there, and why have some of those involved met untimely deaths? This is the crux of a novel that is a marriage of who-done-it and commentary on the class-ridden attitudes of the early 20th century. The action takes place in the immediate wake of the war, when battle-damaged men try to adjust to civilian life. One of these, Laurence Bartram, is persuaded to try and find out why a fellow officer, John Emmett, has apparently committed suicide; the persuader is Emmett’s sister Mary — romance hangs in the air.

The ensuing narrative twists and turns its way from one hypothesis to another, by way of a large cast and much speculative conversation between Laurence and another old comrade-in-arms, who is given to reading Agatha Christie, while serving as a sort of Watson to Laurence’s Holmes. Period touches abound, effectively enough — there is much poking and riddling of coal fires and consumption of unappetising meals. And the link between the young officers is the writing of samizdat poetry.

The underlying theme of the novel — the rigid social assumptions and prejudices of the day — is subtly interwoven with the fast-paced narrative, in which one revelation succeeds another, and just as you think you have spotted a looming denouement a new event subverts everything. A dubious asylum for the mentally ill, in which John Emmett has been incarcerated, is a sinister presence; the NCO who seems to have been the villain of the piece during the execution is perhaps also the rapist and murderer of a French girl. The reader becomes quietly confident — aha! But Agatha Christie is not invoked for nothing; there is more than a bow here in the direction of classic detective fiction.