John Wyndham (1903 – 1969) is best known for his science/speculative fiction books, of which The Day of the Triffids is the best known. Foul Play Suspected was his second novel (the less said of his first, The Secret People, the better), published in 1935, is not science fiction at all, but rather a mystery/suspense tale set in England between the two world wars.
It opens with Phyllida Shiffer – yikes, what a name to burden a woman with! – returning home after a three year stint in India. She is now a widow, and it soon becomes clear that her husband is not mourned by her at all. Her father, Henry Woodridge, is a somewhat eccentric scientist who has a laboratory on the grounds of his estate, The Grange. When Phyllida arrives, the place is empty with all the furniture under sheets, as if her father had planned to leave for an extended period of time.
She can’t get any information about where he might have gone, so she goes to London to see her cousin, Derek Jameson, and find out if he knows anything. He is living in a flat with his friend Barry Long, whom Phyllida dumped to marry Ronald Shiffer. Neither of them have any clue as to where her father might be. She returns to The Grange, and as she is about to eat a quick dinner in the empty house, there’s a knock on the door, and she is swiftly abducted.
From that promising beginning, there unfolds a tale of industrial espionage, murder, and the potential end of the human race. Unfortunately, when he wrote this novel, Wyndham still hadn’t developed a distinctive style. I can tell he’s trying to create a Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie type of story, but none of the characters are really fleshed out. Derek, the putative hero, makes all kinds of wisecracks, but instead of making him endearing, he just comes across as insensitive and snarky. Barry might as well be a piece of furniture. The villain, Ferris Draymond, Director of Amalgamated Chemicals, is as clichéd as his company’s name.
The most interesting character, Detective-Inspector Jordan of Scotland Yard, is very good. Taciturn, smart, and empathetic, he redeems the novel. However, despite his best-laid plans, Draymond manages to outwit him in the end. There is a relatively satisfying ending, but it doesn’t resolve the main issue, which is what will become of a formula for an incredibly lethal poison gas.
Wyndham wrote this in 1935, when it was becoming more and more clear that Germany was re-arming for another war. He includes some prescient commentary on how arms races escalate, and how fragile civilization is. Here’s Jordan talking about how bleak things look for the twentieth century:
“The twentieth century,” said Jordan, “looks like being the bloodiest century on record before it is finished — and I’m not thinking of the war. The system’s rotting. It’s like a city of great buildings. Up in the turrets, on the roof gardens there is clean air in which thrives a clean culture of magnificent possibilities; down below is the accumulated filth and stench of centuries with the foundations rotting among it. … You nicely comfortable people like to think of the bad old days, you pat yourselves on the back because there is more freedom, less cruelty, less meanness in high places than there was a couple of centuries ago. There isn’t. But you’re shut off from it all — you don’t see it. We do. It’s there, and it’s growing. Right under the noses of the really educated class — who, I grant you, aim at a high standard — there is a moral rot spreading like a slow disease. Don’t ask me where it comes from, I don’t know, but it’s there. A callousness, a careless, unnecessary cruelty, a return to Nature. The barriers which civilized, educated men have tried to raise against the raw, the savage and the cruel have never been consolidated, and now they’re giving way. You don’t see quite so much of it in this country yet, but before the end of the century people in your circumstances will be brought face to face with it. You’ll put up shutters on your houses; you’ll go in twos at night.” Location 2558, Kindle edition
Unfortunately for us all, Wyndham’s predictions largely came true. In a few years, he would hit his stride penning such dystopian bestsellers as The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos, and Chocky. Foul Play Suspected is a flawed early attempt at what he would later excel at – creating believable and disturbing speculative fiction that makes the reader think.
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