Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
1948: the height of the Cold War with Russia and other unfriendly states working to produce their own atom bomb by fair means or foul, and foul means espionage. In Cambridge a young linguist catches someone’s eye and is whisked away to London to be recruited by the Covert Operations Section of GCHQ ostensibly to work as a translator. The reader detects pastiche here but there are rules even in pastiche. How did Beattie Cavendish escape notice for long enough to have three years at Cambridge when she had already served as an “executive” in the French Resistance - and killed her man? No one was keeping tabs? Whatever, she remained incognito until wooed back to the day job with a mission to get close to Ralph Bowen, a Tory politician and Shadow Foreign Secretary, who is suspected of Communist sympathies.
Beattie complies and, by way of seducing the target’s son, infiltrates the Bowen household where she finds a corpse in the study, is herself attacked by a masked intruder and rescued by Corrigan, a war-damaged veteran and private eye who has been retained by Edwina, Bowen’s wife, to find out where her husband goes at night. The body is identified as Sofia, the Bowens’ housekeeper, a Polish refugee. Out of simple humanity, but augmented by their common interest in her employer, Beattie and Corrigan pool their resources and start their own investigation to find the killer, the common denominator being the White Pearl Club, a brothel catering for sexual deviants: i.e. queers (sic) and cross-dressers, and various loveable staff of questionable gender. The client of note is the Shadow Foreign Secretary, a fact that has escaped all but one member of the Press, and he has been leant on so heavily by his editor that, detecting dark forces behind even the newspaper’s proprietor, the reporter has decided it’s wiser to spike the item, but he remains in the wings: a ticking bomb.
With the sole reporter muzzled, those dark forces now concentrate on Beattie and Corrigan who find themselves intimidated and threatened by the police at the same time that the Bowen family unites in begging them to go away. But the couple forge ahead, determined to discover not only Sofia’s killer but the identity of the person or people equally resolved to stop them. Meanwhile the reader, on her own track, is trying to work out the plot of, what may be no pastiche after all, but a new angle on the spy novel. It conforms to tradition – with tweaks. There is the fashionable church, the suspect priest - and a glorious performance of the Messiah; there is the Arts and Crafts safe house on the Essex salt marshes and strangers haunting the dunes. A rent boy is murdered and his body dropped in the Thames. There is a code, and the club: that ever-present club where we never get beyond Reception. Despite the title and a lurid cover there is no titillation here, no innuendo; it’s a sex club just, and a clue.
There are too many clues: an embarrass de richesses, heavy-handed like the confrontations: a lachrymose cri de cœur on a wet night on Brighton’s promenade; the tizzy spats that read like a script from the slush pile, the eaves-dropping. Vital conversations are overheard from concealing shrubbery, from doors cracked ajar, from behind heavy furniture - and all related in a breezy girlish style and a sense of puppy dog humour which, considering its subject matter, is neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring. Espionage produced masters of the genre but it takes a different kind of master to make it funny. This one goes for triple twenty and misses the board.
