Terrific title, and a really good read.Terrific title, and a really good read.
At the tail end of the last day of 1945, Danny McCrae, formerly of SOE (British undercover operations during WWII), in his shabby South London office, is waiting for clients. High heels click up the stairs, an ice-cold, upper-class, blonde beauty appears. She’s Kate Graveney, and she thinks she may have killed a man – her lover, Philip Anthony Caldwell – and wants Danny to find out whether she did or not. Caldwell is no stranger to Danny; he was Danny’s boss in SOE. As 1946 starts, Danny searches for the truth, but meets only blank walls until Caldwell’s wife Lisa contacts him.
But even then Danny cannot get at the truth: Kate, Lisa and Caldwell are tangled together in an iron web of deceit, guilt and blood, a hideous version of the children’s game Truth or Dare, Kiss or Promise. Danny finds himself blundering further and further into a mire of deception and personal danger. And there are complications: first and foremost, Danny’s own physical and mental problems arising from his imprisonment in Dachau while on an SOE mission in occupied France.
He is troubled by blackouts and memory loss: yet he knows that, in addition to the horrors of the concentration camp, there was something else, some other submerged memory that is connected to his quest for Caldwell. Then there is the constant presence of Wilson, the violent and corrupt detective inspector who doesn’t like private detectives and would like to nail Danny for a series of murders of prostitutes in the red-light district of Soho. However, Danny is not wholly alone: there is the elusive waiflike Val, the brothel-keeper Mama Mary, the villain Jonny Crane. And in the final resolution there is one last really amazing twist.
This is Gordon Ferris’s first novel. It is a classic private eye tale with complications and betrayals on all sides, and Danny is the classic private eye, outwardly hard-boiled, inwardly vulnerable. These tales do not usually translate well to a British setting, but this one does, and what makes it is the setting - London, bombed almost beyond recognition: weariness, queues, rationing, discomfort and deprivation.
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Radmila May