The cover of my copy carries an illustration of a dark-skinned person wearing some kind of grass skirt and an enormous stylised mask, and carrying a spear. The back cover trails “dark rituals . . . a high-class call girl, a dead New Guinea tribal chief, [and] a homosexual marriage”. Things aren’t promising, folks, and as the casual racial epithets pile up in the first few pages, it seems like they’re going to deliver on that failure of promise.
But actually, you know what, this is not bad—neither aesthetically nor morally. In fact, it’s pretty good. The plot is essentially a well-structured whodunnit, resolved satisfyingly, with the solution hidden in plain sight if you knew where you were looking. The protagonist, Jimmy Pibble, is cursed with an awful name, but doesn’t seem to have let it get to him: he’s a thoughtful and somewhat put-upon copper with a general air of decency and duty about him. He has a remarkably deep knowledge of architecture. The style is straightforward, somewhat writerly in places but never overly so, except perhaps in a stream-of-semi-consciousness passage towards the end. One nice touch: this is the first of a series, but there are scattered allusions to previous cases and incidents, in a tone of familiarity. This somehow makes the reader feel comfortably at home with the character and the setting. It’s a neat trick which I always appreciate when it’s pulled off well.
Hang on, though: what about all that lurid and dubious material with which we were threatened? Is that not all a rather large problem? Well, the blurb oversells; the book doesn’t titillate. It is true that the plot centres on a very small Papua New Guinean tribe that has wholly relocated to London under the care of an anthropological white saviour in the aftermath of the second world war. Now, this is a fantastical contrivance, though Dickinson manages to make it just believable enough. But it’s not in itself an abhorrent notion, and the main purpose of the contrivance is simply to provide the structure for the whodunnit: the closed list of suspects, the interlocking interests and motives. It is, again, true that there is plentiful material about the rituals and customs of the tribe, but this is all given a very straight description, as if the author has been immersed in and is dutifully reciting the most neutral anthropology he can find: there’s nothing much by way of exoticisation here. The “homosexual marriage” is between the white saviour (a woman) and a male tribe member; it’s homosexual by virtue of the white woman being treated as a man under the customs of the tribe. This is the sort of detail that I feel couldn’t possibly have been made up. And it is, again, true that there are rather more racial epithets than one might like, but they’re mainly deployed in a morally inert way in accordance with the insensitivities of the time. In fact, we’re carefully given a scene involving Pibble and some London locals whose sole purpose is to demonstrate that he, unlike them, is pure of any hint of racism.
All in all, this was pretty enjoyable, all the more so for being short (157 pages of admittedly rather small type). Which is lucky, because next on the menu is more Dickinson and more Pibble.