Philip MacDonald, one of the best writers of GAD, wrote, in 1959, this novel, the last of his literary production.
General Firth, deputy head of the CID at Scotland Yard, accepts a rather unusual request from his friend Adrian Messenger, an English writer, with a military past, and related to the Marquises De Gleneyre: to discreetly investigate a list of ten names, collecting material on them. The reason behind it would be an alleged guilt "far older than any political machination". Adrian leaves for America (California) and Canada, where he should find answers to his suspicions, but on his return, he is the victim of an attack on the plane he is traveling on: the plane crashes into the sea, but he, a woman, and a journalist, Raoul St. Denis, are saved. However, after Messenger, as if in a trance, has repeated several times some nonsense words, he dies at sea, while Raoul is saved and with him the woman. Firth then turns to his direct superior at the CID, the commander of the CID, Sir Egbert Lucas, submitting to him what Messenger had asked of him, especially since more than one source claims that Messenger was the target of the attack (which however killed 43 other people). In turn, Lucas turns to Anthony Gethryn, who has worked successfully at the CID several times, and they unravel more than one skein. With the results already collected by Firth, and with the help of several subordinates (the journalist Flood, the Superintendent of the CID Pyke and Sergeant Seymour) he manages to give an explanation of the list: almost all of them, 9 of the list, all died in accidental circumstances (elevator, car, train derailment, shipwreck, etc..) except one, Slattery, who despite being disabled in war, is alive. Slattery is the only one who fought in France, while all the other 9 fought in India and Burma. When they are trying to protect Slattery thinking that he could be the last victim, it happens that they realize that this Slattery is not the one Messenger had indicated, but his cousin: the real Slattery had also died in accidental circumstances, and he had also fought in Burma, against the Japanese. Having established a connection between the 10, it is learned that Messenger had also fought with them in Burma. Who on earth had an interest in killing 11 people, and to kill them did not take care to suppress about 60 other innocent people?
Gethryn will begin a 360° detective investigation, which by deciphering the last words spoken at sea by Messenger, will lead him to the trail of a military life novel that Messenger was completing to publish it, and to compromising photos, which will have as consequences, another victim (Messenger's typist-secretary). It will be discovered that a member of the regiment in which the 11 killed had served, had betrayed them by selling them to the Japanese. then after years he had killed them: why? One would have expected the opposite, as Sir Lucas reproaches Gethryn: that the betrayed had decided to take revenge on the traitor, and instead... But why does this happen? Gethryn will discover the real reason. a hereditary succession that would have led the criminal to become a Marquis, after having also eliminated the old Marquis and tried to eliminate the fifteen-year-old Viscount, heir to the Marquisate, if Gethryn had not discovered it and in a convulsive finale, forced to flee with no return.
This is a sort of summa of MacDonald: he who can be said to have invented the serial killer, in Murder Gone Mad, and in X v. Rex, creates in this novel, the perfect murder and the perfect murderer, when it had only been hypothesized many times but never realized: the result of a superfine plan built at the table, carried out over several years, with the sole purpose of returning to hold that power that his father had lost. Yes because, in this novel, in addition to there being what seems to be a serial killer but is not, and instead is a supercriminal, for whom five, ten, twenty, fifty, sixty victims are nothing, perhaps just a number (to paraphrase an old famous phrase: one death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic), there is also the return of the heir, one of the most recurring motifs of the most classic British mystery. But there is also the love story between Raoul St Denis, a French journalist, and Jocelyn Messenger, Adrian's sister-in-law and his brother's widower. And also a tight police investigation (should we say a classic precedural?), which makes use of Gethryn's acumen, but also of the collaboration of his closest aides, who also go to various places in Great Britain, to gather information. It will be Gethryn, who in the hypotheses of resolution of the sentences said by Messenger and misunderstood by Raoul who is French, who has also forgotten other vital ones for the resolution of the meaning, to gradually decipher the true meaning, until he discovers a diabolical plan. In which all the carnage had no other purpose than to eliminate possible witnesses of a terrible event that occurred about fifteen years before, who perhaps would never have known of the existence of their informer, but who if they had known, could have become very dangerous witnesses and derail the rise to the marquisate of their former comrade in arms.
And what could have become, according to the murderer's plans, the last act, that is, the death of the very young heir, due to a fatal accident, turns into a resounding victory for Gethryn, with the disorderly escape of the murderer who then dies in a car accident. Which, however, does not seem to be a casual accident: Gethryn, with the help of his French partisan friends, makes sure that someone who could never have been convicted for his numerous crimes, because he had taken care not to leave traces of his passage, disappears forever? Philip MacDonald does not say it clearly. It seems to me, however, that he, at the conclusion of his literary experience, imitating Christie who had the perfect murderer killed, by a Poirot much older in Curtain, arrives at the same conclusions, or rather seems to arrive at them. I repeat. The interpretation of the kiler's death is entrusted to the reader's sensitivity. In other words, to defeat the perfect murderer, and stop him and make him pay for what no earthly judge could ever do, MacDonald, unlike Agatha who clearly says that Poirot kills the perfect murderer, is more diplomatic, we would say more sly, and does not say that Gethryn causes his death, but he implies it. He does not even say how it happened.
After all, Gethryn and his old Maquis allies, wait until they can hear the roar of the car driving away, and then not hear it anymore: "It was Raoul who broke the silence which followed. He said, “So
his death is through explosive accident——” He was philosophical.
“What you would call, I think, a justice poetic. . .” . He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
So his death occurred in an explosive accident, says Raoul. But did the jeep explode before falling into the ravine, as a boy testified, or did it explode after falling?
The novel is MacDonald's last masterpiece, I would almost say his true masterpiece: a book that after almost seventy years is still a great read, and has its own catalyzing energy. A mystery that gradually becomes a thriller. And that has a thriller ending.
From this novel, moreover, an unforgettable film by John Huston was made, in 1963, The List of Adrian Messenger, with a stellar cast for the time: Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Dana Wynter, Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, George G. Scott (who played Anthony Gethryn).
Pietro De Palma
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