For the first 100 pages or so, I thought I was going to really dislike this. In those 100 pages we’re introduced to an apparently excessive number of characters, all dislikable, while being subjected to a little too much 1920s period detail. It’s clear that contrivance is afoot, that all these characters will end up entwined in some way. It’s not clear that such obvious contrivance, with such unpleasant people, is going to be at all enjoyable.
But you know what, it turns out that the next 250 pages are well worth the slight slog of the first 100. All the characters end up on a liner crossing the Atlantic, and farce ensues. Murderous farce, of course, but farce all the same, and increasingly comic. Through a string of coincidences and poorly chosen pseudonyms, dentist Walter Baranov ends up being mistaken for a famous police inspector (Dew of Crippen case fame) and tasked with investigating a murder on board, which may or may not be a murder he himself has committed, in consort with his beloved Alma, who is masquerading as his estranged wife and possible murder victim Lydia.
It’s all pretty silly, but is clearly meant to be, and once things get going, it’s a page-turning pleasure. Baranov approaches the case, consciously or not, by presenting such a bumbling front that people feel intimidated into telling him everything, for fear that the great (false) investigator Dew is three steps ahead of them already, operating on a higher plane. Meanwhile the other characters slip in and out of disguises, each other’s rooms, and so on, in the best farcical style. You’re so taken up with the comedy that you’re distracted from the underlying progression of the case, which is in fact very cleverly constructed and subtly revealed, and so the smart plot twists emerge organically and surprisingly. And since it’s a farce, it really doesn’t matter that most of the characters are unpleasant or flawed: that’s what they’re supposed to be.
I could well imagine someone hating the whole thing, if they didn’t have taste for situational comedy and such mixed with murder mystery, and I do think this sort of genre mashup is often done poorly (q.v., perhaps, that Keating book two years ago), but for me the payoff here was well worth getting through the slightly laboured setup.