BEAT NOT THE BONES – Charlotte Jay (1954)
I finished my reading for Bev’s Vintage Mystery Challenge
with Beat Not the Bones by Charlotte
Jay. This is an absolute corker of a
book and received the recognition it deserved by winning the first ever Edgar
Award, presented in 1954. Since young
Stella married the much older and distinguished anthropologist David Warwick,
they’ve lived separate lives. She has stayed in Australia to care for her dying father and David has returned to
Marapai, New Guinea, to continue his work.
When David commits suicide and Stella’s father dies, she travels to this
exotic world to investigate David’s death.
She’s convinced he has been murdered and she is determined to learn the
truth.
I hardly know where to start. Jay is a superb writer. There’s not a superfluous word in the
novel. In Jay’s hands, the glorious
aquamarine water, the fabulous flowering plants, the natives with their dark,
supple skin and frangipani flowers in their hair, do not evoke a bright and
airy world. Instead, the sea holds
dangerous creatures, the inhabitants of the island are mysterious and unknowable, and the jungle is menacing. The Australian administrators are a strange,
fevered crew, oppressed by the climate and the futility of bringing
“civilization” to the natives.
I’m not even going to attempt to summarize the plot, except
to say that I was drawn ever deeper into the narrative with a terrible
foreboding of what Stella would find.
The last thirty pages of this book contain one twist after another, and
I raced through them to the end. The
writing is so superior that I found myself comparing Jay to Joseph Conrad. He was a master of evoking the moral decay
(and occasionally, the redemption) of white men among the muddy rivers and
coastal towns of the third world. I’m
thinking specifically of Heart of
Darkness, Lord Jim, and Almayer’s Folly.
Jay is just as good. High praise,
but justly deserved. I’d highly
recommend this book.
Beat Not the Bones is an entry in the Golden Girls category of the challenge.
I have a copy of this in Mt. TBR. Now I will definitely have to read it. I have two other Charlotte Jay books in this mess of a home somewhere. Someone wrote about Jay in a magazine article I read and I knew she would appeal to me. Her real name was Geraldine Halls and she also wrote under that name as well as one other pseudonym. I usually collect a pile of books before I ever get to reading one title by a new author. This laudatory review will definitely get me to read her work (finally!) in the coming weeks.
ReplyDelete..now it's just a matter of securing a decent copy!
ReplyDeleteI found mine through inter library loan, although it was a later edition and had a different cover. Frankly, I thought it was an improvement as the one pictured above just doesn't suit the superior nature of this book. Hope you find one.
ReplyDelete