THE GIRL FOR THE GOLD

In Parker’s comedic crime drama set after World War I, a small-time detective must deliver a ransom to an aristocrat’s kidnappers, but then he too is kidnapped.

Rusty MacDuff, this delightful novel’s memorable protagonist, isn’t a great or famous private eye, but he’s willing to do what other, more respectable professionals won’t: “I specialised in the shameful, the embarrassing and the peculiar, with lucrative sidelines in the awkward and the disgusting.” He’s hired by the Duke and Duchess of Pirbright—not to find their 20-year-old daughter, Hattie, who was kidnapped from her own home three weeks ago, but to deliver her ransom: £150,000 in the form of gold bars. However, while MacDuff is waiting to make the drop at Wealdcombe Manor—the Pirbright’s home in Sussex, England—someone steals the gold out of what he thought was a secure room. MacDuff decides to keep this news to himself, so he can investigate the matter; he methodically composes a list of 14 suspects, which includes Hattie’s“fatheaded fiancé” George Fields. The case is strange, indeed; for instance, the police dismiss the abduction as a hoax, believing the scant evidence left behind to be manufactured. Then, a postboy, Eleazar Jones, is bludgeoned on the property, and Barleycorn, the butler, claims to have seen an “eyeless savage” nearby—a shirtless man, lathered in mud. Meanwhile, MacDuff must contend with rivals, including a genuinely great and renowned detective, Father Oremus, a Dominican cleric who calls himself the “Mysterious Monk” and believes “crime-fighting was the highest form of theology.” The deeper MacDuff investigates, the more he begins to suspect that there’s more to the case than meets the eye.

Parker artfully combines a recognizable iteration of detective noir with snappy British humor that calls to mind Agatha Christie and P. G. Wodehouse. Parker’s work is an homage to literary works of the distant past, and, as such, isn’t brimming with originality. However, it remains an impressively perceptive novel in which sharp comedic banter frames a thoughtfully conceived darkness. The plot is complexly tangled, but never gratuitously so, and moments of suspense act as welcome invitations to think through the mess. MacDuff is remarkable in how unremarkable he is; he’s hapless but deeply intelligent, and unprofessional but surprisingly brave. He also possesses a kind of cheerful cynicism that makes him both entertaining and admirable: “Why stay in a place where life was cheap and law was weak? Because you knew where you stood. And could fight back. And if someone was nice and decent after all, well, you could only ever be pleasantly surprised.” World War I lurks in the background of the story—a conflict that MacDuff calls the “suicide of Western civilization”; it’s a catastrophe in which the detective participated years before, “spending the prime of [his] life in European ditches.” This paroxysm of global madness sets the tone for the whole work, which explores what people will do to be happy in a chaotic world.

A thoroughly enjoyable mystery that’s humorous and absorbing.