I'd just feel better about that calculus if, for example, we'd ever seen the grieving parents of the murder victim on the page or gotten any sense that they factored into the equation.
Understood.
This book sounds like one of the rare cases where Francis just blew it. I am all for complicated sympathies, but I am sort of out of tolerance for disposable girls.
[edit] I remembered that since leaving this comment, I re-read Margery Allingham's Coroner's Pidgin (U.S. Pearls Before Swine, 1945), which does not involve exactly the same question of the cost to the living, but it is the one where Campion finds himself investigating a death in connection with someone who is not a close friend of his, but a friend of long standing nonetheless—enough to keep referring to him absently by first name in formal situations—who is aristocratic and war-heroic and well-liked while the murder victim was lower-class, possibly blackmailing, definitely embarrassing, and not much mourned by anyone except her husband. Their entire social circle wants Campion to make the problem go away, Campion himself is just trying to get home and see his wife for the first time in three years, it would be overwhelmingly easier not to get involved, certainly not to confront the increasing possibility that someone he's known since they played cricket against one another at school is capable of murder and worse; there wouldn't be a novel if he didn't, of course, but the novel at least thinks about it. It thinks about the husband's grief and it thinks about Campion's own reluctance and his awareness that he's going to smash up a lot more than a family's illusions if he's right and perhaps even if he's wrong. Plotwise, I think it blinks slightly at the last minute, but not emotionally. So the Francis shows up badly against that, too.
no subject
Understood.
This book sounds like one of the rare cases where Francis just blew it. I am all for complicated sympathies, but I am sort of out of tolerance for disposable girls.
[edit] I remembered that since leaving this comment, I re-read Margery Allingham's Coroner's Pidgin (U.S. Pearls Before Swine, 1945), which does not involve exactly the same question of the cost to the living, but it is the one where Campion finds himself investigating a death in connection with someone who is not a close friend of his, but a friend of long standing nonetheless—enough to keep referring to him absently by first name in formal situations—who is aristocratic and war-heroic and well-liked while the murder victim was lower-class, possibly blackmailing, definitely embarrassing, and not much mourned by anyone except her husband. Their entire social circle wants Campion to make the problem go away, Campion himself is just trying to get home and see his wife for the first time in three years, it would be overwhelmingly easier not to get involved, certainly not to confront the increasing possibility that someone he's known since they played cricket against one another at school is capable of murder and worse; there wouldn't be a novel if he didn't, of course, but the novel at least thinks about it. It thinks about the husband's grief and it thinks about Campion's own reluctance and his awareness that he's going to smash up a lot more than a family's illusions if he's right and perhaps even if he's wrong. Plotwise, I think it blinks slightly at the last minute, but not emotionally. So the Francis shows up badly against that, too.