This book, also featuring Inspector Hazlerigg, was published in 1949. I'm not sure what to say about it as I really have no idea what was going on in it. It featured three heroes: a new guy, Paddy Yeatman-Carter who is recently out of the army, our friend "Nap" Rumbold who is firmly out of "Intelligence" and now doing boring law stuff, and Inspector Hazlerigg who, I think, meets Nap in this book. Major McCann, who got established in the previous novel in this series, features briefly, but does not play a significant role. (We do hear an update that he has gotten married to a woman who was running one of those dicy businesses in the shady part of town that we were introduced to in a previous novel and it it is hinted at that they are now running the place on the right side of the law.) The events that kick off the story are clear enough: Paddy has a job he hates and is coming home on the train late one cold, dark early Spring night and sees through the windows on his car into the next car, a guy who looks extremely morose and Paddy immediately gets the sense that the guy is going to do himself in. So, torn between thinking "it's none of my business" and "the problem with the world today is that everyone says everything is none of their business", Paddy decides to chum up and glom on to the guy until he's brought around to his senses. Once off the train (they get off at the same stop), Paddy realizes they are (sort of) neighbors. He uses that as an excuse to greet the guy, make small talk, and then suggest they go out for a drink at the nearby pub. The guy agrees and within a few hours, it seems that Paddy's plan worked: the sad sack, Mr Britten, admits he is in a dark place because he's just been laid off, and also tells Paddy that he's convinced it's retaliation because he saw something suspect "in the books". He shows Paddy some slips/receipts (that mean absolutely nothing to Paddy since they are enumerated transaction reports). But, after a few more beers, the slips are forgotten and they stumble to their separate homes. The next morning, when Paddy is leaving his apartment, he sees Mr Britten's lights are still on in his livingroom--even though it's sunny and almost noon. Then, Paddy sees a crowd of looky-loos and finds out that Mr Britten was just pulled from the river. The police are saying that he'd been in the water a while and there was no evidence of foul play. The preliminary conclusion is that he jumped. Paddy finds this hard to swallow: so last night after cheering up, Mr Britten went into his dark apartment, turned on the lights, rested for a few hours, then got up, left his apartment (leaving the lights on), and toddled off to throw himself into the river? Well, it's not IMPOSSIBLE, but it is ODD. Or so Paddy tells the police--which puts Paddy at the top of the suspect list. And, because he was held over night in a police cell, Paddy loses his job. Well, now he is really in a pickle.
From that point, things kind of spiral into really complicated weirdness: Paddy meets Nap (they don't know each other up to this point) and become roommates and Nap gets him a job as a journalist for a newspaper that specializes on business and the economy (I guess like the Wall Street Journal) which gives Paddy the excuse to be a Nosy Nelly, poking around businesses and asking impertinant questions. Paddy goes to Mr Britten's work place and sees a guy with one eye coked out of his mind (he's the accountant who generated the suspicious payment slips!) and Mr Britten's supervisor (who is all Crocodile Tears) pretends to care that Mr Britten is dead--until Paddy makes an anti-commie remark and THEN the mask slips!!! Then there is another "suicide" and Paddy is again on the scene--and now the police are decidedly suspicous: why is Paddy relevant to two completlely unrelated suicides? THEN Nap goes to a swanky club run by mobsters and is surprised when they start threatening him--and, just in the nick of time, strangers (who turn out to be undercover detectives who are keeping an eye on the mobsters) cause a scene so Nap can escape before he gets himself killed. At that point, Paddy, Nap and the police are working together. And into all that Nap decides he wants to get married and Paddy decides HE wants to get married and a nurse (Paddy does spend a lot of time in the hospital after getting into fights with strangers when walking home late at night) and a secretary show up and start getting into the mix, playing Nancy Drew and Bess Marvin when the boys, Nap and Paddy, are off being the Hardy Boys:
[That's Bess up front with Nancy, always a red head, in the back, on the left. The blond, I can't remember her name, is their client.]
As far as I can tell, the bad guy is a sleeper agent for Russia and is a fanatical communist in London pretending to be a fanatical capitalist so he can (a) accumulate a lot of money while also (b) destroying the frail British economy from the inside, who occasionally partners with Italian-English (NOT Italian immigrants, we are assured) mobsters who (a) monopolize cocaine imports and sales and (b) kill people so it looks like suicide as a side hustle.
I never did understand RICO laws when in law school--I'm not at all surprised that organized crime pays so well in this country because I doubt anyone actually understands where business ends and crime begins--and this novel is just a lengthy case study of two (and sometimes three) organized crime units in London with converging interests and fairly useless police using two hapless ex-army guys as their unwitting undercover agents. I would say the only people who need to read this are those completists who want to know everything that happens in the personal lives of our regular characters.
Meanwhile, after finishing that, I started Gilbert's Crack in the Teacup (published 1966) and it is (so far at least) BRILLIANT--Gilbert in true form. I intended just to read the first few pages to see if it was any good or if I needed to take a break from Gilbert and the next thing I knew it was 2 am and I was on page 122.
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