April 23, 2008
The Misplaced Corpse : silk stockings and bloody murder
I was an English major at uni, so its hard for me to write about a book without lapsing into a 3000 word essay. Its sort of automatic. But I was an English major because I love books, which is why I am here, doing it again.
I’m not going to write about a specific genre; there are a lot of blogs about particular genres and I have no wish to compete with them. What I am going to do here is a mishmash of books I love, books I have loved for a long time, and books I am learning to love. And maybe a few books that are awful.
First ups, the book I’m doing today is a little known Australian crime classic called ‘The Misplaced Corpse’, by A. E Martin. First published in 1944, the book was recently reissued by the Wakefield Press. Introducing red-headed Rosie Bosanky, ‘alarming, disarming and altogether charming’, this book might have been written a modern audience in mind. Featuring Australia’s first female private eye (Phryne Fisher is cheating, guys!), this book might be considered pretty groundbreaking.
Rosie rocks! She knows exactly how good her figure is and how to dress it, and has no compunction about using it to get her own ends; she knows how to read fingerprints and handle a gun; she can take an approximate time of death with no instruments but her eyes and her hands and she knows exactly how far to lead on a man so that he may be useful without getting too close.
She was taught most of his by her policeman Pappy, in a manner that might raise eyebrows today. I imagine it would have raised a few eyebrows then: Rosie was raised on a huge collection of murder stories, learns exactly which big crime bosses are banging who, and when she got older, had dad takes her for visits to the local morgue.
Rosie has had her office open only one day when a plum client falls into her lap; Roy Stockforth Adams, a clueless and very well heeled gentleman whose wife has cleared out on him. It looks to everyone like Roy has been made a fool of, but things take a dfferent turn when Rosie and Roy find a corpse in his wife’s room. Roy, of course, becomes chief suspect, but with Rosie believing in him (and keen to keep the bank cheques coming) the mystery deepens.
The mystery is certainly interesting, but the real entertainment comes from Rosie herself. Her conversational tone is highly engaging, and is peppered with a mix of mispelled franglais (rendezvooz, for example), Shakespearean references, and charming confidences. But I will let her speak for herself:
‘I would be the last one in the world to lead you up the garden path and I wanta say now, if you got in your mind this is a war book, you had best go and fight the bookseller for your money back because its a book about my first case which occurred when the war was a pup and which I gave the name The Misplaced Corpse, because, if ever a corpse was misplaced it was this one.’
Without quoting the entire book it is hard to give a sense of just how fun Rosie’s story is to read, and I would advise you to investigate a copy to flick through, so that I can prove my point in something less than 3000 words. Let is just be said that Rosie Bosanky is hot stuff, and in this book she will solve the mystery, meet a few charmers (including fancy Clancy), give a few friend’s specials (wouldn’t you like to know what they are?) and finally get her hands on that seventeen guinea hat from Mlle Fifine’s.
