"Death of an Englishman" by Magdalen Nabb

Death of an Englishman by Magdalen Nabb, a good old fashioned murder mystery.

The story was written 30 years ago. The cleaner is 42, he was 6 when WWII ended, which would make it 36 years later, or 1981, which was 30 years ago, which is when this story was written. I mention this because it had a very old fashioned feel to it. It seemed to be set in much earlier time. I can't quite say why that is. Any elements I care to mention, like the officiousness of the officials, the shabby surroundings, the embarrassment of the characters, can not readily be attributed to any particular time period. So maybe it's just the style of writing that makes it seem old. The style is very different than the Spenser stories.

I think I have finally figured why mysteries are so popular, and perhaps why I enjoy them. The plot of solving a crime is just a thread on which the author can hang his observations about people. As there is an infinite variety of people, and people are infinitely complex, there are no end of insights to be made. You could read a mystery a day for hundred years and just scratch the surface of people's behavior. Nothing more interesting than ourselves. Hmmph. The plot? That's just something to string you along. There were big holes in the plot in Potshot, but it didn't really matter. The plot was just a vehicle for setting up the situations the characters find themselves in. What the characters think, feel & do in that situation is what makes an story interesting, or not. Anyway, that's today's theory.

A couple of English language Science Fiction books are found in the victims apartment. I am always curious when an author mentions another book. Who knows? It might turn out to be a real find, so I Googled the titles, but I didn't find much. It has been 30 years, so the books mentioned could have simply vanished. I could not find a book named Planet on Fire that existed back in 1981, though there is one called Planet of Fire written in 1974 by Sir Patrick Moore. The other is called Out of all Time, but the only one I could find was written in 1988, which would put it out of the running, by one Terry Bougher and seems to be a gay and lesbian history, which should put it doubly out of the running.