The Last Vintage Mystery

ARMS FOR ADONIS – Charlotte Jay (1961)

 As it turns out, I thought I had concluded my eight books in the Golden Girls category of Bev’s Vintage Mystery Challenge but I was one book short. I decided to finish the challenge by trying a second book by Charlotte Jay, whose superb Beat Not the Bones had delighted me.  Arms for Adonis did not disappoint. This book is set in Beirut, a city so beautifully described by Jay that I could almost smell the hibiscus blooming.

Sarah Smith has decided to leave Marcel, her lover, and return to England. She is not an ideal heroine, being far too dreamy and distracted to take charge of her life. She drifts from man to man and situation to situation. As she wanders through the market on her way to the airport, a bomb explodes. In short order, Sarah is kidnapped by a handsome Syrian, sees him shot down, and finds herself delivering a message from him to a member of the Lebanese secret police.

I finished the book without really feeling that I had deciphered the plot. Like Middle Eastern politics in general, it was murky. Was Emile Khalife a villain or hero? Who was plotting against whom? Was Sarah caught up in a coup attempt or a tribal feud? And what of the English characters? Were they caricatures, dupes, plot devices? Upon reflection, it occurred to me that Jay must have intended that, like the country and people she described, the events of the book should remain shadowy and indistinct. The forces at work in the troubled region were and are too difficult to segment and categorize. We are left troubled and slightly bewildered about the story we have read, just as we wonder at the accounts we read today of the alliances and enmities, feuds and revolutions occurring in the Muslim world. Fifty years after its publication, Arms for Adonis illustrates that things change slowly, if at all, in the Middle East.

I’ll be searching out the rest of Charlotte Jay’s work. She’s an amazing writer.