Books: Suspense on the Thames

THE LONG MEMORY (256 pp.)—Howard Clewes—Doubleday ($2.75).

When Philip Davidson was sprung from prison after doing 17 years, there were a few Londoners who had a right to feel uneasy. Davidson had been sent up for a murder he did not commit, and two witnesses who might have established his innocence had remained inexplicably silent. So the police kept an eye on Philip Davidson. Commander Lowther, detective in charge, had a special interest in the case. His wife had once been Davidson’s mistress, and one of the two witnesses who failed him.

The Long Memory is a “suspense” story, one of that rapidly growing species that doesn’t care to be seen on the same shelf with a common whodunit but can’t quite qualify as serious fiction. What lifts English Novelist Howard Clewes a few cuts above his fellow practitioners is a kit of writer’s tools that many a more important novelist would be glad to borrow from. His writing is clean as a whistle, economical without being starved for words. He can get suspense without straining for it, because it is less the product of plot mechanics than of atmosphere and contending personalities.

It had been a sordid murder, and the victim, a small-time criminal, had taken his last lumps on a shabby barge moored in the Thames. Davidson, a riverman’s son and an innocent bystander, happened to be there because his girl Fay lived on the boat. Fay was a big, handsome girl, and when the trial was over, Policeman Lowther courted and married her. Lowther is a decent man, rather long on conscience. He wants to protect his wife, who has never told him what really happened, but he also knows that Davidson has been wronged. The real kick for the reader comes not from the smooth, credible unraveling of the case, but from the tensions that mount as Author Clewes unlocks the hiding place of human guilt.

Better than anything else in A Long Memory is the fine evocation of place, and the descriptions of the bleak lower depths of river life. In Thus Am I Slayn (TIME, April 5, 1948), Author Clewes flashed his talent but failed to make his meanings clear. In this book his pitch is plain. But it is possible to praise him and still raise the question that a lot of gifted minor English writers prompt: Why doesn’t he tackle something bigger?