I liked it, it’s a mystery, a crime story of a murder committed in the poorest district; everything is complicated and also easy, if you know where to look :-p
Only thing is, I was sorry because I sympathised with the murderer, even more so after learning the whole story. So sorry he died…
As is usual for Wallace, it has many characters and many stories around the main mystery, it has engaging dialogs and a complicated plot, and it has various cops, a journalist and a young woman.
The title refers to a mysterirous thief. He appears, steals the jewels of some celebrity and disappears.
Now the plot in details, and there’s a lot of details.
Michael Quigley is a journalist, a young man in love with Janice Harman. Janice is also very young, she’s well off financially after an inheritance, but she’s so good and naive and charitable… so naive that she still believes in fairytales, in a way.
After writing to each other for some time, Janice decides to meet and then marry Donald, who had such an adventurous life… like a true hero…
We know right away that it’s not what she thinks he is when he starts thinking of other women he knows in town, so we’re not surprised when she learns that he was a con-man.
Janice worked at Doctor Marford’s clinic, in the poorest part of town, Tidal Basin. She left it to get married, before she realised the truth about him.
One night, the doctor was chatting with sergeant Elk, as friends, when they hear two men fighting. Elk takes one into custody, the other one dies. Inez, a woman terrified about what happened, asks him about the fight and tells him everything about her fears… but then he tells her that the men weere poor workers, she calms down and goes home.
That night, around 10, the doctor sees a man punching another, but when he sees him falling down and not moving, he runs away. The other man, he was Donald, gets up and walks, he meets cop Hartford and tells him that he did it on purpose, to fall so the other would stop. The cop walks, Donald suddenly falls down and a thief, Lamborn, sees it all and rushes forward to search his pockets. Hartford sees him and Lamborn runs but gets caught. Donald is still on the ground, but Hartford sees doctor Marford going to him so he keeps hold of Lamborn. Hartford tellsMarford to check on the man, and the doctor says that the man is dead, stabbed.
Chief Inspector Mason arrives with doctor Rudd and inspector Bray (who is a bit dumb, and resentful that Mason gives more importance to Elk who is a sesrgeant than to him).
An honest woman carrying some beer, Mrs Albert, tells the police that the man was already down when Lamborn approached him. Lorna Weston starts screaming that her husband killed that man, and she wants to see him to check it’s him, and then faints.
Mrs Albert was carrying beer because her husband can’t drink beer at work, he’d be fired if found out, so the man leaves the gate open for her wife to use to bring him some beer…
Louis Landor, Inez’s husband, was the man who punched Donald, and then he escaped using that open gate, closing it after passing.
Donald was Inez’s first husband, and was now blackmailing her.
Marford helps fainted Lorna, and takes her to the police station, but siince they realise she’s an addict, she’s seentto the infirmary, she can’t talk.
Rudd, quite a rude man, says that he has a theory - nobody is too eager to listen to him, but he won’t tell anyway for now, and then he disappears.
Michael visits the crime scene with Mason and sees Janice’s ring, and he starts lying about not knowing it. After talking to Janice, who gave the ring to Donald, he tells Mason everything. Smart girl.
There’s a good man living at Tidal Basin, old Gregory who owns his own taxi, and he’s reknown as the most honest man there is.
Lamborn refuses to tell anything to the police, sure that they want to jail him for something or other.
…
Now it’s not too difficult to discover the truth, if someone thinks about what they’re reading.
So I’ll move to the explanation.
Years ago there were two brothers, Thomas and Walter, orphans. Thomas was younger and was sent to school, while Walter did everything he could to send him money so he could have a good life.
Thomas gets through medicine school. To findthe money, Walter started robbing banks, and then he met Donald, in Australia. He used the name Furse, and Thomas did too after joining him there. He met Lorna on the ship, and they’ll soon get married. He didn’t want to wait, but he’ll soon regret it, while Lorna will meet Donald and fall in love with him, and will love Donald forever.
Thomas is so grateful that he wants to help him now, and the three of them rob a bank. It goes well, but then the newspapers say that if someone helps the police arrest the robbers, he’ll get immunity and also a monetary reward. The brothers are not surprised when they learn that Donald betrayed them. They tried to run away as soon as they read it, but they get arrested and put in prison.Walter dies there.
Thomas will never forget it or forgive him, of course. He loved his brother very much.
Still, he is a doctor, and in Australia he was known as Furse, so he comes to England and starts working using his real name, Marford.
Lorna finds him and still knows who he is, so she blackmails him. Marford starts stealing jewels as White Face - because he covvers his face iwth a white piece of cloth - using a toy gun. Walter was against weapons. He said that it’s despicable to kill someone because they’re doing their job, like protecting the bank or trying to arrest criminals.
Marford only steals jewels from rich people, and then he sells the stones. That’s how he ha the money for Lorna, and to keep a clinic to help the people and children of Tidal Basin.
Then he learns that Donald is in England, and that night he sees him. The second time Donald fell on the floor, it was because he had a heart condition. When Marford sees Hartford stopping the thief, he approaches the fallen man, sees a dagger or something that Landor lost, and uses it to stab Donald.
Of course, who else could have done it, but the thief or the doctor? The thief was totally clean when Hartford stopped him, while the doctor’s hands was stained with blood, supposedly because he checked on the dead man.
Marford also saw some keys on the floo and took them.
Marford tells Mason that it must have been a murder of vengeance, that someone took this chance to avenge something that happened years ago, maybe.
Knowing that as a doctor he won’t reveal what people tell him, we’re supposed now to think that maybe he knows something of who did it but won’t tell.
When Marfod is caught, he doesn’t resist at all, and tells Mason everything, before killing himself with a vial of cyanide that he kept in his mouth.
They tried to make us think that Rudd was involved, and for that purpose at the end, when Marford tries to escape and has to take Rudd prisoner because he had guessed the truth right away, we read that ‘he’ talks to ‘the doctor’, telling him he will soon wake up completely and use his car to get to the police.
Marford wanted to run away but had no money, so he used Landor’s keys to steal his money, and unhappily hits Elk on the head because he had no choice. He likes Elk and still thinks of him as a friend. Elk does too.
Also, he was the one who drugged Lorna so she wouldn’t be able to tell her story too soon.
He smiles when he tells Mason that if only Rudd and Lamborn had talked to him and told him everything right away, he would have realised the truth in no time.
From 1930. ITA Maschera bianca
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