J. B. Priestley Mystery & Detective Fiction Analysis
J. B. Priestley’s early novel Benighted (1927), published in the United States as The Old Dark House (1928), was more of a gothic horror story than a detective story, and I’ll Tell You Everything (1932), written with Gerald Bullett, was an early spoof of the cloak-and-dagger tale then gaining in popularity. It was with his last three crime novels, Saturn over the Water: An Account of His Adventures in London, South America, and Australia by Tim Bedford, Painter (1961), The Shapes of Sleep: A Topical Tale (1962), and Salt Is Leaving (1966), that Priestley hit his peak as a detective-fiction writer.
Saturn over the Water
Saturn over the Water is a good book and much more of a mystery than the earlier novels. It owes something to Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957) and has delicious reflections of John Buchan’s The Power-House (1916), The Thirty-nine Steps (1915), and his neglected The Courts of the Morning (1929). Tim Bedford, a successful painter, promises his dying cousin Isabel Frame that he will find her estranged and missing husband, Joe, and tell him that she still loves him. It is a soap-opera opening to a nicely constructed and skillfully plotted novel of intrigue, travel, and involvement with a secret organization. This group is busily plotting to force the Northern Hemisphere to destroy itself through biological and atomic warfare, leaving the cabal, whose sign is Saturn over the water, free to create a new and better world in their own image in South America, Australia, and Africa.
Bedford’s only clue to the whereabouts of the missing scientist, Joe Frame, is the hastily scribbled list of names, places, and things in his last letter, posted from Chile. He is intrigued by the mystery, especially when he identifies one of the names as that of another English scientist, Frank Semple. Semple had worked with Frame at the Arnaldos Institute in Peru and had returned home psychotic and had committed suicide. Bedford travels from London to New York, then to Peru, Chile, and Australia, each stop identifying more of Frame’s list and bringing him into contact with shadowy people who will ultimately play major roles in the solution of the mystery. Bedford, unknown to himself, is in reality a pawn in a power struggle, the catalyst the opponents of the cabal have needed to bring the global plot to an unsuccessful conclusion.
Similar to Richard Hannay’s foes in The Thirty-nine Steps and The Power-House, the opponents in Saturn over the Water are men with superhuman intellects, men capable of exerting powerful influence over lesser minds. Using the concept of the astrological changing of the ages, Priestley matches the Saturnians against those under the sign of Uranus, the peaceful ones.
As Bedford makes his journey, Priestley makes use of his stops to comment on the neo-Nazi mentality, the threat of communism, the misuse of technology, and the strange world of the arts. Although Priestley himself espoused Fabian socialism, he despised Marxist principles, instead identifying himself as anticonservative politically.
The characters here are not as exhaustively drawn as those in Angel Pavement , but the reader does get to know them well enough for their motivations to be acceptable, at least for the more realistic of them. Other characters, especially as the novel nears its end, seem fantastic: Mrs. Biro, the clairvoyant; Major Jorvis, the Australian police officer through whose form the Saturn superintellect works; and Pat Daily, an apparent drunken junk dealer who is in fact the Old Astrologer of the Mountain and the “force” representing the Uranian side of the new age. As the novel ends,...
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the reader is pleased to find that Tim Bedford and Rosalia Arnaldos, the granddaughter of the founder of the institute and the Saturn cabal, have married. She has inherited the institute and Arnaldos’s vast fortune, and together they dedicate their resources to the betterment of humankind. Still, the reader is left with the uneasy feeling that although a battle has been won, the war is far from over.
The Shapes of Sleep
The Shapes of Sleep is considered by many to be Priestley’s best work in the genre, although Salt Is Leaving has its champions. Ben Sterndale, a forty-two-year-old freelance journalist, is hired by a friend, an advertising executive, to locate and recover a mysterious piece of green paper that has been stolen. Sterndale has only a list of names of those who visited the office the day the paper disappeared with which to work. He begins his search, unaware of the import of the missing paper, which is part of an experiment in subliminal mind altering, designed for use not only in marketing but also, and more important for the story, in political propaganda.
Sterndale’s search takes him to the Continent; in and out of the clutches of Eastern and Western espionage agents; through late-night forays in breaking and entering, into romantic trysts with secret agents; and on journeys by car, train, and boat to arrive somewhere and do something before someone else arrives and does something less pleasant. His role is that of an amateur James Bond, and he falls into and somehow escapes from one dangerous situation after another until everything falls into place. Priestley’s usual concerns are present. He uses the book to poke fun at the deadly serious espionage services of both sides, at the ultrajingoism of people involved in that type of activity, at the social situations that give rise to “sides” competing for the minds of humankind, and at the powers that control the political machines on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
The Shapes of Sleep is a suspenseful, rapidly moving book with realistic action (so far as the secret services are concerned), enough danger to whet the reader’s interest, and a surprise ending that justifies the novel’s existence. The characters and their actions are presented in a typically strong Priestley dramatic form. It would make a fine film.
Salt Is Leaving
Salt Is Leaving would also make a satisfactory film or even a stage play. Lionel Humphrey Salt (“Call me Salt when you’re tired of doctoring me”) has given up his medical practice in the depressed and depressing town of Birkden after seven years. He yearns to move on, to the south of France and then possibly to Africa or India, where he apparently lived for some time. He delays his departure out of concern for a patient, Noreen Wilks, who has been missing for three weeks. Salt’s concern is centered on his interest in kidney diseases, Noreen’s rare chronic nephritis, and her failure to renew the prescription needed to keep her alive. His search involves him with the world of Sir Arnold Donnington—the industrialist who owns United Fabrics and, through his company, the town of Birkden—and with Maggie Culworth, whose father has also disappeared. Maggie works in her father’s bookstore in nearby Henton, her place of refuge after several years and a disastrous romance in London. All she knows is that her father took the 1:35 bus to Birkden and that a letter from a Peggy Pearson, written on stationery from the Lyceum Cinema in Birkden, has come to her father. Maggie goes to Birkden and meets Salt.
Because there is no obvious crime, the police are not eager to help Salt in his search for Noreen, who is described by Superintendent Hurst as “just another of these little fly-by-nights.” As the story develops, the reader learns that Noreen knows Culworth; that Noreen has been having an affair with Sir Arnold’s son, Derek; that Derek has accidentally killed himself while cleaning a gun at five in the morning; that Worsley Place, next to the United Fabrics Club, has been used as a romantic trysting place by Noreen and Derek; that Noreen is Culworth’s child from a romance during World War II; that Sir Arnold is desperately trying to cover up everything that concerns his son; and that Culworth has suffered a concussion at Worsley Place and is under sedation at a private home. As the story progresses, the relationship between Salt and Maggie, at first an uneasy truce, begins to develop into a romance, culminating in their planning to leave together at the end to find whatever happiness the world has to offer elsewhere.
Two other characters contribute to prolonging the mystery: Sir Arnold’s daughter Erin, full of barbiturates, alcohol, and misplaced sexual drives, and Jill Frinton, a “hostess” at the United Fabrics Club. At the end, Salt, Maggie, her brother Alan, and Jill confront Sir Arnold with the truth, and the mystery is solved. Salt and company agree to keep silent about the truth in return for Sir Arnold’s agreement to their terms.
The story is a good one and well written. The characters are believable and realistically motivated. Priestley here, as elsewhere, uses his novel as a means of looking askance at social problems and conditions he does not like. The high-handed industrialist who controls a town through his wealth and power is revealed in a most unfavorable light. The plight of those who must work under less than desirable conditions comes under scrutiny. Even those who seem to have some power within the structure are belittled, because they do nothing without the approval of Sir Arnold. The everyday lives of Salt’s patients, mostly drawn from the lower and depressed side of Birkden, are given in such a way as to elicit sympathy.
Priestley’s work in the detective-fiction genre is short on bulk, but his political theories and beliefs, his socialistic leanings, his practical but utopian ideals, are easily found in his novels. As a technician, Priestley is sharp, oriented toward the stageability of his product, and a careful constructor of plot and character. His novels read easily and command the respect and attention of the reader.