Mysteries are practically proscribed at our house. An invisible banner above our mystery shelves reads: “If it is not Simenon, it is not worth reading.” I cannot coax my husband to read Dorothy Sayers, James M. Cain, Ellery Queen, or even Agatha Christie. He simply is not interested.
I became a mystery fan after I saw the Peter Wimsey series on Masterpiece Theater years ago: I enjoy Golden Age detective fiction, police procedurals, some thrillers, and historical mysteries.
This weekend I lost myself in genre fiction. I read three mysteries in three days. The first two were Golden Age mysteries: Margery Allingham’s Black Plumes (1940), which is set in an art gallery where a slashed painting is one of many senseless, malicious acts that end in murder; and Anthony Boucher’s Rocket to the Morgue (1942), a locked-room mystery in which a detective and a nun strive to prevent the murder of of a greedy literary executor who has been attacked. I thoroughly enjoyed these, and may write more about them later.
But the third one is the knock-out: Julian Symons’s The Man Who Lost His Wife (1970), a psychological thriller about a publisher’s psychotic, violent breakdown.
Mild-mannered Gilbert Welton is a bit of a bore. He likes a quiet life and has a strict routine. When his charming wife, Virginia, announces that she plans to go on vacation alone to consider the state of their marriage, Gilbert is convinced that she got the idea from a women’s magazine. He envisions the headlines: “Do You Need a Holiday from Your Husband? … The Strain of Being Happily Married… Are You a Robot Wife?’
Gilbert does not have a high opinion of Virginia’s intelligence. But he becomes madly jealous at a dinner party when he notices that other men find her attractive. He is furious at his pushy, flirtatious partner, Max, who poaches best-selling writers and is saving the company from ruin with dicey practices. Gilbert wonders if Virginia is having an affair with Max. (It is possible.) When Virginia and Max, too, incidentally, are out of the country, Gilbert settles down to his routine again.
The first part of the novel is delightful, set mostly in Gilbert’s publishing office, and reminds me a bit of a novel by Angus Wilson or perhaps Barbara Pym. There are lost manuscripts, arguments about whether to publish an art book about the new Spatial Realists (conservative Gilbert nixes it), lunches at the club, and conversations with an unconventional, emotional American writer who has been recruited by Max.
But we do get the feeling that something is wrong with Gilbert. He goes to a Spatial Realists art show and is convinced that his wife is the subject of one of the paintings.. And then his obsession takes a more disturbing turn. He is indirectly responsible for his drunken ex-wife’s s suicide, and one aggressive incident leads to to another. He travels to Yugoslavia to find Virginia when he cannot contact her at the hotel, has a violent encounter on the road , and eventually there is a murder.
And after that, I am not at all sure about Gilbert’s perceptions. Needless to say, this violence does not go undetected. Does he actually go home to a docile wife, who says, “A woman’s place is with her husband. I mean, she should live his life, not the other way around.” Or is that his imagination? It doesn’t sound at all like Virginia. There are a few other scenes that seem off.
Is this meant to be realism, or psychosis?
At any rate, I raced through this brilliant, suspenseful novel.
