When writing about the book "Rich men, dead men" a few days ago, I wrote1 that "I was struck by the thought that the device of having a murderer commit several 'unnecessary' murders in order to hide the motive behind the one important (to the murderer) murder was slightly familiar to me." I continued by suspecting that one of the four 'Hampstead murders' books of Guy Fraser-Simpson used this plot device.
Whilst lying in bed that night, I remembered that this device lay behind the first 'Hampstead murders' book, "Death in profile", about which I wrote2 several months ago. When rereading this book, I noticed (in chapter 17) a hint to an earlier precedent, a book called 'The laughing policeman' from 1968 by the married authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. I found this book and read it this morning; here nine passengers of a bus (including the driver) are murdered, shot by machine gun. The police find it suspicious that one of their detectives was amongst the dead, and try to establish why he was on the bus. At one stage, the detectives go through the nine people, sorting between those who almost certainly had no connection to the massacre and those who might possibly have some connection, including one man whose face had been so badly disfigured by bullets to make it impossible to identify him. I have to admit that I didn't rate this book very highly; I wasn't sure whether the first half was supposed to be comic as the detectives seemed to be very second rate. The second half of the book is much better, though.
In 'The laughing policeman', the victims are all killed together, whereas in 'Death in profile' and 'Rich men, dead men', the murders occur serially. As such, the precedent isn't that strong, as it seems fairly obvious that in a mass murder, there is bound to be some 'collateral damage', as the politically correct description puts it - people who have no connection to the murderer are killed simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That said, had the murderer killed only two people on the bus, then the police would have had an easier time detecting the killer.
'The laughing policeman' also mentions a song called 'Jolly coppers on parade'; as the book was published in 1968, it obviously can't be a reference to the Randy Newman song4 of the same name. But apparently the reference is in reverse - according to a New York Times article from 1977, [Newman] took the title of “Jolly Coppers On Parade” from a Swedish mystery novel.
When I was gifted my Kobo electronic book reader, I noted3 Every now and then, the top right hand corner of the page is shown folded - like one used to do with a real paper book when wanting to save a reminder or to bookmark the page. I am not aware of doing anything to cause this graphic to appear and I don't know what it means (RTFM). I recently discovered what the folded corner meant: when displaying the various books in a collection, pressing on the three horizontal dots next to a book's name will bring up a menu, and the final option on this menu is 'annotations'; the folded corner creates an annotation to the given page in the book that can later be referenced.
I also discovered how to search for a given word within the text of a book. Pressing on the middle of the page will cause several icons to appear, such as 'return to collection' and the various display options. At the bottom of the page appears a question mark that seems to bring up a search menu, but the search seemed to be confined to a dictionary which isn't a very useful option. I discovered that pressing on the down arrow by the word 'dictionary' causes a menu to appear, containing the following options: Kobo store | My books | Current read | Annotations | Dictionary. Obviously the wrong option had been set for the search function; I needed 'current read'.
Internal links
[1] 2007
[2] 1911
[3] 1734
[4] 1886
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 105 | Sandy Denny - Live at the BBC | Sandy Denny | |
| 762 | Watching the weight (once again) | Health | |
| 889 | More statistics functions with SQL | DBA, SQL, Statistics | |
| 1077 | The 'check-field' trigger | Priority tips | |
| 1177 | Knocking my head against a brick wall | Programming, Delphi, Priority tips | |
| 1671 | A day spent studying | Nutrition |
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