Premedicated Murder, by Douglas Clark

Sunday, November 14, 2004

Douglas Clark's 1975 midseries murder mystery Premedicated Murder features Scotland Yard detectives, a murder, and the class conflict familiar to Americans from the televized version of Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley series. Detective Inspector (DI) Green acts the boor, "inconsiderately" sucking on fragrant cough lozenges and wielding crumpled cigarettes from his pocket when not cadging them from others. Although his superior, Detective Superintendent George Masters, has tried to get Green reassigned, the Yard believes that they, together with Brant and Hill, the remaining members of their four-man team, work too well in murder investigations to break up. From a U.S. perspective, Green's siding with the working class and sucking cough drops when his throat tickles sound perfectly normal, but thinking of Masters as Lynley and Green as Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers helps.

Since Premedicated Murder was written three decades ago, there are barriers bigger than the Atlantic, not to understanding, but to identifying closely with the lead characters. Sexist comments like "'Poison? That doesn't sound like a yob's work. A woman's trick, more likely'" and "'He says that long hair breeds lice. When I point out to him that girls would still have to keep long hair if the sexes were going to be as differentiated as he wants, he says that lice must be misogynistic because girls don't get them'" are so absurd as to be very funny. In this era of the deliberate exposure of thong waistbands and other external uses of underwear, Green's concern with propriety seems excessive: "...conscious that they were wrinkled round his ankles and that his position in the chair was such that he must be showing a length of hairy bare leg. Green was prudish about such things." But Green isn't the only one. The woman he is interviewing says, "'I shan't mind if you take your jacket off, so long as you are not wearing braces.'" Such touches are delightful and bring the reader quickly back into an era where there were standards of modesty.

Like Green, the murder victim of Premedicated Murder had served proudly in World War II. Unlike Green, he had suffered serious injury to the entire side of his body, so much so that had he been anyone else he would have been in a wheelchair, but being Roger Harte, he got around with the help of his wife and neighbors. Newlywed Sarah Harte had been working in a drug dispensary when her husband was crushed in an accident on the front. She successfully sought transfer so she could tend her husband and the armed forces. Her devotion to her husband was complete, so it was unthinkable that she would have wanted him dead.

Roger Harte died of Ricin poison, a drug processed from the seeds of the castor bean and one of the world's most deadly poisons. In the hands of terrorists, a couple of spoonfuls, as Douglas Clark tells us, could wipe out London. Ricin is only one of the products of castor beans. Harte's neighbor, Rencory, processes the beans for feed, but the plant has such lethal potential that it is immediately clear that even if Rencory knew nothing about Ricin's manufacture, his business was the source.

Roger Harte is the most respected person in Lowther Close, and his next door neighbor, Rencory, is the community's most hated member. Roger had been urging the rest of the community to accept Recory, but his efforts had failed. It is therefore puzzling that Harte, Rencory's only friend and champion, appeared to have ingested the poison while having a cup of after dinner coffee with his neighbor.

Rencory had means and opportunity. In Scotland Yard practice, motive need not be established. Still, it didn't make sense.

Premedicated Murder
by Douglas Clark
Dell Publishing
1981
172 pages

Sunday, November 14, 2004