Fentastic! Murderer's Fen aka Hide and Go Seek (1966), by Andrew Garve--Garve is Marve! Part I

Missing girl cases invariably make national headlines in the United States and the United Kingdom, at least if the "girl" involved is young, white, pretty and, preferably, blonde.  Last year's tragic case of the late Gabrielle Petito was one on all fours, as it were, and accordingly occupied the attention of the national press in the U. S. for weeks upon weeks.

In Andrew Garve's fictional missing girl case, Murderer's Fen (Hide and Go Seek in the U. S.), the missing girl, Gwenda Nicholls, is actually described as auburn-haired, but the cover of the Popular Library reprint, in the John Kahn Harper Novel of Suspense series, depicts her as a blonde, proving my point once again.  Blondes not only have more fun, they get more attention when they go missing--the latter doubtlessly a dubious blessing (not one you hope to have take advantage of, I mean).

But I'm blonde!

Although she is a redhead, not a blonde, Gwenda is young (20 years old to Gabrielle Petito's 22) and pretty and Garve's book lays a lot of stress on her winsome looks.  When the police investigate her disappearance they ruminate over how tragic it is that such a  pretty girl might have been murdered.  Presumably the disappearance of a plain girl (and one girl is dismissed in the book as "extremely plain") would not be quite the same tragedy.  We can scoff at this attitude, but how much has it really changed, I wonder?  And when did we stop calling women in their twenties "girls" in crime fiction, and have we gone back to that convention with The Girl on the Train, et al?

But enough with the social history questions, you want to know about the plot of Fen.  And here the plot is definitely the thing.  

Fen is a short novel, even by Garve's standards, around 50,000 words, so there's not a lot of room for in-depth characterization, but I found it very enjoyable, with real ingenuity in the plotting.  I have read some subpar Garves, to be sure, but I don't believe this is one of them, short as it is.

This puts me at odds, once again, with blogger Jason Half, whom I last mentioned in a post I did on a collection of Michael Innes short stories.  Jason's review of Fen again suggests he's not a short fiction kind of guy.  Interestingly (to me, anyway), I find myself quoted is his review, from this review I did of Garve's novels No Tears for Hilda and The Far Sands, on the matter of brevity in crime fiction.  

In that piece I praised Garve for keeping his novels short, in contrast with lumbering crime opuses of the modern day,  However, Jason's review might well be called "When Brevity Goes Bad."  To be sure, Fen as already mentioned really is rather short (if it were about 10,000 words shorter it would be a novella), but I didn't share Jason's problems with it.  To the contrary I liked the book quite a lot.  

The plot can be briefly stated.  Jason calls it "cleanly simple, even cliched," but I would prefer to say it is drawn along classic lines.  

Handsome nogoodnik Alan Hunt meets and seduces beautiful, young, sheltered and naïve Gwenda at a Norwegian pleasure resort where she has gone with her parents.  He just can't help himself from bedding her, even though he is planning to marry another young woman with good financial prospects, Susan Ainger.  Susan, you see, has a rich daddy and money of her own too, even if she is, as mentioned above, "extremely plain."  For her part Susan just can't resist Alan, who is described in the first sentence of the book as "a big, blond, strikingly handsome man."  (See, blonds have more fun too.)

Fun over, Alan returns home, having left dim Gwenda back in Norway with her strict parents and a false address.  Home in Alan's case is a remote spot in the fen country of the East Midlands, where he works as a salesman of caravans and motor cruisers.  Unfortunately for Alan, Gwenda, having managed to track him down, shows up one day and announces that she's pregnant with his child.  

Bloody hell!  What's a bloke to do now?  

Well, Gwenda is very pretty, certainly, but Susan is stinking rich, so obviously it's time to get rid of Gwenda.  As he foists her off with promises of marriage and blissful visions of happily ever after, Alan in his head begins cruelly to map out the girl's liquidation in this providentially isolated location.

So passes Book I.  Book II introduces a good cop team, Superintendent Tom Nield and Sergeant Tom Dyson of the Cambridgeshire police and pits them against the scheming Hunt, who is a most worthy opponent, having gone to a "sound if minor public school"--Have you ever noticed how there are more villains in classic detective fiction from minor public schools than from major ones?--and excelled at "mathematical puzzles" and "amateur theatricals."  In other words, Alan has got a keen, if nefarious, plotting brain and is a blithe and brazen bullshit artist.

Thinking that Gwenda, like other girls gone missing, has been murdered, the police try to find her body, but they come up short.  Now what's a body--er, I mean bobby--to do?

this cover gets the hair color right

Jason will have his nitpicks, but I thought Alan's murder scheme was gloriously devious in the grand Golden Age manner, even though 1966 was well after the demise of the Golden Age.  Book III for me took this inverted mystery to a whole new level.  There is some really adroit clueing gathered on a few pages, which I must admit went over my head at the time!  But you can look back and see how nicely done it is.  

Jason seems bemused by all the great publicity that Andrew Garve once got in the States.  It's certainly true that Garve's American hardcover publisher, Harper, was relentless with with "blurbage" for its authors, like Eudora Welty's "Give us Garve!" which he evidently finds amusingly mercenary sloganeering.  It's certainly not subtle!

However, Garve was even more popular in England, where he was frequently reprinted in paperback and was one of the top names at the Collins Crime Club, who also published Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh.  To be sure, Garve's named faded after his retirement from writing in 1978 (though he survived in paperback reprints for about a decade), but that has happened to a lot of people.  I don't believe that Garve's popularity was simply a product of smoke and mirrors from Harper's publicity department.

In one of those Harper blurbs Rex Stout points out that "simon-pure detective stories" having become a rarity (and good ones even more so), Garve was the all the more to be appreciated.  I think that gets at some of his appeal. 

Had Garve been a bit older he likely would have become one of the most prominent exponents of the classic detective story, but coming of age as a fiction writer when he did, during the Silver Age of detective fiction (where he was one of its leading figures), Garve diverted a lot of his talent into other forms--domestic suspense, espionage, police procedural--and crime-detection hybrids.  Murderer's Fen is a hybrid, yet it offers a lot of the delights of detection and ingenious crime plotting which we associate with the Golden Age.  

On the brevity matter, Garve wrote short crime novels in an era when short crime novels were in vogue.  Influential crime fiction reviewer Anthony Boucher was sure to grouse in the New York Times if one of the books he was reviewing approached 100,000 words and, indeed, he sometimes complained that 80,000 word books were too long.  One American newspaper review of Hide and Go Seek, as Murderer's Fen was aptly retitled in the U. S., nicely sums up this attitude, so at variance with Jason's:

Endlessly inventive and effective, Garve is in complete command of his tautly built story.  He wastes no time and no words.

Anthony Boucher for his part said of Hide and Go Seek: Grade-A Garve--which is one of the highest recommendations going.  And reviewing the novel in England, future CWA Red Herring award recipient F. E. Pardoe cited the novel as further evidence that Garve was "the best creator of ingenious plots in the crime fiction business."  It's also excellently reviewed on amazon.co.uk here.  No doubt Jason would prefer reading Ross Macdonald, but others enjoy a little Garvey to moisten their crime meat.

Had Harper asked me to blurb Garve--an unlikely event, to be sure, given that his last book was novel was originally published in 1978--I might have said "Garve is marve!"  First making sure Eudora hadn't taken that one already, of course.  That lady was one mean blurbist.  But she genuinely loved mysteries, just like a lot of literate and brainy people.  She liked the mysteries of Ross Macdonald (and Ross himself) a great deal, no doubt preferring them to Garve's; but she admired Garve's a great deal too.  I'll let Eudora have the last word.  Here's her full "Give us Garve!" quotation:

Andrew Garve, who never lets us down, has written another one as deft, as well-designed, as refreshign as you could ask for.  Hide and Go Seek is a pleasure.  Give us Garve!

Body, body, where's the bloody body?