Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper by Donald Henderson

Mr Bowling Buys  a Newspaper by Donald Henderson

English Crime Fiction

Source – Library

Don’t Panic, what I’ve started the year off with a book that isn’t a translation. Well, this book was on Jacquiwines’ end-of-year book list, and I wanted a couple of crime-like books to round off the year’s reading. I was amazed that my library had an edition which I collected just before Christmas. What grabbed me in Jacqui’s description was the feeling that the book was in the same world of back streets, and those down on their luck as Patrick Hamilton’s are, with a crime thrown in for free. Plus, the book is set during the Second World War, and at the back end of last year I watched the Foyle’s War series again, which also drew me as a reader to the book.

‘My dear, she laughed, ‘you just don’t know him! He’s as honest and open as the day. According to his lights! Which is more than one can say for some—I don’t mean you, you old pencil! She often called him an old pencil, because of his work at the M.O.I. She teased him about being a pencil and a bit of paper. “Try and be nice to him, won’t you, darling. He’s had a tough break. Married too young. No cash. This time he must try and marry a bit of money, it’s the only thing for a man of his temperament. There’s no shame in it, it’s logic, and he’s got music in him?

‘He’s not very good looking, is he?

‘Hark at him! And nor are you! You old pencil!?

I mean, he always looks as it… as if he’s acting a part. As if he’s out of his sphere?

He is out of sphere. The poor lamb. He ought to live on his country estate. Or somebody ought to leave him some dough and a title. He’d probably do wonders for charity and write a symphony or something?

This captures the problem in his life somewhat

The book follows a serial killer called Mr Bowling, who kills people, and he likes to buy a paper tpo see if the crime has been reported. This is all because he doesn’t want to live. The book opens with why this is he has failed in a lot he has done in hism life and has seemed like someone that maybe has had to settle for second best this includes his annoying wife, He is a failed musician making ends met selling insurances so when he kills the wife Ivy during a bombing raid thius gives him two opportunities the first is to have money as it is assumed she died due to the bombing and the other is the abuility to carry out more killings. He isn’t the cleverest killer; he wants to be caught in a way. He sees this as a release from a life that along the way. Has had so many bad moments. He can’t bring himself to kill himself, but can kill others, for someone to kill him in the end, that is the final idea.

Mr Bowling said Winthrop often came in for a chat, and had actually been in only yesterday morning to invite him to bridge on the Thursday next, and he’d accepted.

When the copper went off to question somebody else, Joan slipped in again with some ridiculous talk about wondering if the police thought she’d murdered Mr Winthrop.

“You? he said.

She was scared and she said:

Well, they think it’s murder. Personally, I should think it was a housebreaker or someone. I can’t imagine Mr Gunter doing it, or anyone else here? And Alice says they think he was killed last night about eleven or so, that was just when I came into your room and you were… or I thought you were having a bath? She stared vacantly. “Where were you?”

He can be quite funny at times there is a dark satire under riding the book

I said this was a crime novel; it’s really more of a thriller, and it’s about human psychology, more like those great dramas we had in the eighties from Ruth Rendell’s thrillers. A book about one man’s life and drive, or lack of it, is a bad luck story. I get the Hamilton connection. This is a man who has had everything go wrong in his life. It’s killing him, instead of falling into the bottle in a way. It also pokes at the rigid class system of the country at the time. How Bowling is trapped in a way by this, but for me it is also a piece of existentialist fiction, is Bowling not from the samew cut of cloth as Giovanni Drogo, a man stuck in a place and time alone in a desert, then Bowling alone in himself in a city of millions as bombs fall all around. If you are a fan of the inverted crime genre and psychological books by the likes of Rendell, Highsmith, or Du Maurier, but with the urban grit of Patrick Hamilton, dark wartime London streets, as we follow a killer trying to get caught, what will the paper say when he next buys it?