Books & Poetry

The outside edge of living memory is, paradoxically, a place perfect for the setting of a detective story – far enough away for readers to know how most of it will end. Most, but not all: the question of who killed artist Titus Mavor and why are the two things in this intelligent period thriller of which we cannot be sure, whereas the stories of the cold winters at the end of WWII, of the Russian coup in Prague or Dior’s ‘New Look’ (all of which turn up in its complex plot) are known matters.

Mavor was seedy enough, and broke enough, to be a blackmailer, but he lacked the discretion, throwing around accusations of spying and other offences in drunken quarrels. Quarrels were something that featured in his life a lot, particularly once director Enescu hired him to design a film scripted by a bunch of Left fellow travellers he did not much like and starring Gwendolen, with whom he had a past. Then someone drugged him, and smothered him, leaving him to be found by Wilson’s Dinah, a woman with no great opinion of herself.

Dinah’s dogged determination to save the accused Colin from hanging – and to ignore his love for her husband – is one of the most attractive things about the book. One of the many things that Wilson’s brilliant career as an academic and feminist has taught her is just how bleak a time the late ’40s were for women’s self-esteem, in spite of the rather nifty frocks. And a woman learning to like herself is on a voyage of discovery that makes her an intensely interesting detective.

This is an atmospheric book in which foggy, half-ruined London is as much a character as the artists and good-time girls who wander through its pages. It would be selfish to hope for more thrillers from Wilson, who has other intellectual fish to fry, but ‘The Twilight Hour’ is so good that such selfishness is inevitable.