Nina Bawden published this book in 1954. Bawden mainly wrote children's literature--around 50 books--so this cozy murder mystery is a big departure as the central theme in this novel is decidedly mature: a young woman using her child-like beauty to seduce and control older men whose mental and physical health were destroyed by the war so now crave to touch, perhaps to be purified by, someone innocent and chaste. Humphrey, a 30-something married man physically impaired from his time as a soldier teaches at a girls school. He's recently ended a three-month-long tryst with a recently graduated student, Rose, who just informed him that she is pregnant with his child. Unsurprisingly, he is upset. Surprisingly, he claims he is CERTAIN that the child cannot be his. He gives Rose £50 "get out of my life forever money" and convinces himself that the matter has been dealt with. But Rose isn't going to be bought off with £50 as she believes Humphrey is "rich." (Rose is "common." Her parents died when she was young and she is being raised by an angry Christian aunt ["There's no hate like Christian love" is a common saying now, and this applies to Rose's aunt very well.] who is convinced that Rose is a lying sneak capable of pure evil. She also tells everyone who will listen that, despite her deep disapproval of Rose, she does her duty and puts food in Rose's mouth so no one can find fault with her. Consequently, Rose's yardstick for measuring wealth is not accurate.) Rose decides to find someone she believes will give her money--Humphrey's wife, Celia. Unfortunately for Rose, Celia is prone to faints (there's always one) and so Rose leaves that meeting empty handed. She did, however, get Celia's attention which is certainly going to get Rose results--just not the ones she wanted.
Celia runs top speed to our narrator, Will Hunt, an old flame (on his part, not hers) who is now a successful (bachelor) lawyer. Celia convinces Will--who used to be very close friends with Humphrey as they grew up together and spent countless hours as children getting up to all sorts of hijinks--to speak with Humphrey and give him solid legal advice. It's clear to everyone but Humphrey that Humphrey is going to be out a job very soon and Celia is worried that Humphrey will set bridge after bridge aflame after being booted out of their rooms at the school. Will begrudgingly accepts Humphrey as a client, though dealing with blackmailing mistresses isn't his expertise. (Though, thinking back, he never says what his expertise was--maybe contracts. He spent a lot of time at a desk drafting papers.) He meets with Humphrey and is astonished at how insistent Humphrey is that the child is not his, given that the dates line up such that he and Rose were still meeting up every weekend for weeks after she became pregnant. Will wonders, how can Humphrey be so certain? I wondered, too: is he infertile? did he use contraceptives? did they not have sex during those last few visits? Humphrey never explained but just said, "It CAN'T be mine!" Will doesn't believe him and neither did I. Will concludes that Humphrey is delusional and needs to be counseled to do the right thing. (Though Will never specifies what the right thing is, exactly.) After, Celia meets up with Will to pump him for information about her husband and Will tells her everything, including the fact that he believes Humphrey is the father and is (legally) on the hook for caring for this child. Celia is distraught, but blames herself. She admits to Will that she has no sex drive whatsoever whereas Humphrey is, she hints, insatiable. She says that, in all fairness, she can't blame him. All she wants is for him to admit he did it, give notice, and to move them far away--preferably to Scotland--where they can change their names and start life over.
Not long after Celia leaves Will--who throws himself into his "regular work" (whatever that is)--Will finds out from his "friend," a police chief, that Rose has gone "missing," presumed dead, as a purse that looks like hers has been found tangled in weeds along a canal. Immediately Will assumes that Humphrey "did it" and he tears about town, telling everyone his suspicions--including Celia and Humphrey. Unsurprisingly, Humphrey is angry and he goes into hiding without telling anyone where he's going. Celia, of course, thinks Humphrey killed Rose and spends the next several chapters crying, refusing food, growing thin and pale.
Real legal work be damned, Will throws himself into this Rose mystery--not to clear Humphrey but to verify Humphrey's guilt. In the course of poking around and asking questions he has no right to ask, he finds out that Rose, despite her astonishingly innocent beauty (she is compared to a fresh, unopened pink rosebud way too many times), had been hanging around a pretty crazy group of friends in the past year: a gang of toughs ("Chavs") who drink a lot, use cocaine and heroin, and make their living by selling stolen stuff and pushing pills. These ruffians and Rose would meet up in a very unlikely place, a nightclub called Odd Flamingo (ok, so that's why the book is called that), which provides a meeting space for all sorts of dubious hook ups in the wee hours. It's also where we meet Humphrey's unlikable brother, Piers, who isn't gay but should be given his tendency to drink fruity cocktails, make cutting quips, dress in bright silky clothes, sleep late, and hang out with handsome men less than half his age. It's not clear WHAT Piers' orientation is other than that he's insatiably greedy, sadistic and willing to exploit ANYONE if he can make money doing so.
Round and round Will goes, tracking down people who do not want to talk to him, telling them Humphrey's problems and urging them--if they see Humphrey--to tell him to turn himself in to the police and admit he's killed Rose. By this time you are likely questioning Will's lawyering: at no point did Will actually give Humphrey useful legal advice and at every point he told every person he met--including his friend the police chief--everything he knew about Humphrey and his suspicions that Humphrey is guilty of murder.
Finally, we get to the end that no one could have predicted. I won't describe any more plot points as doing so would give the whole shebang away, but I'll say this: (1) as seedy as the story was so far, it gets way seedier, and (2) Will establishes himself as the most unreliable narrator in the history of unreliable narrators.
Is it a good book? Well, it's a fast read and, though Will is a terrible amateur detective, he is good at exposing the vices of every person he meets. But the best feature is his internal dialog, which is solely concerned with how much everyone annoys him and so is very entertaining. So, yes, it's a good book. But it's also nasty as it turns over a lot of society's rocks to expose the moral rot underneath.
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