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The Night of the Twelfth (1976)
Blurb:
My review: Nothing epitomises the changes in the detective story more than a comparison between Nicholas Blake’s A Question of Proof (1935) and Michael Gilbert’s The Night of the Twelfth (1976). Both are school stories, and in both the victims are children. In Blake’s book, a boy is strangled—brutally and quickly—and thrown into a haystack. There is a credible reason behind the motive. In Gilbert’s book, on the other hand, the child is tortured to death—murder for sadism, and off-puttingly graphic, the author “speaking quietly and with a lack of emphasis which seemed to make the words he was speaking more horrible”. As the book progresses, however, the tone gets lighter and more humorous—it is worth putting up with the disturbing opening chapters to reach Gilbert’s amusing and well-drawn depiction of a prep. school setting, with believable students, and entertaining depictions of lessons and of games. One of the masters, Kenneth Manifold, is an undercover policeman, both keeping an eye on Jared Sacher, the son of the Israeli Ambassador, who could be under threat from the P.F.O. (and certainly not without reason, for what right have the Jews to occupy Palestine?--no, I am not anti-Semitic, as my sympathies lie with the Arabs in this matter), as “any servant of the Israeli State who lives or moves abroad is a target” (very topical this—Israel has always been in the news); and attempting to discover which of the four well drawn masters is the sadistic murderer. The theme of intrusion of violence into the secure world of childhood—almost a passing of age ritual, mirroring the problems of adolescence—is well handled without cliché: “There's violence everywhere in the world. It’s increasing and it will go on increasing. Nobody who is young today can expect to go through his whole life without meeting violence. By coincidence you have run up against it twice in the last few months. It could be useful, or it could be harmful. That depends on you.” Gilbert sees schoolmasters as people who have never grown up, who have attempted to “lock the gate … shut out the disturbing influences, and live for ever in an innocent cloud-cuckoo land among people who never grew up.” Common problems of boarding schools crop up: corporal punishment is attacked as being “all bound up with sadism and sex”; while homosexuality / paedophilia is also ascribed to sadism, as “it’s nothing to do with [boys’] bodies. It’s psychological. It’s based on sex. And sex is based on sadism. And they're both an extension of the power complex.” Sadism itself, or “cruelty for the sake of cruelty”, while “not a common disease” is a “very unpleasant one when it does occur”. Michael Gilbert memorably draws a relentless portrait of inhuman evil, bringing about an ending surprising, depressing, and disturbing, with a genuinely evil and horrifying murderer disclosed after a genuinely edge-of-the-seat chase, “a game of blindfold chess … played across the board of the English countryside”; the one flaw being that the true villain does not get all he or she deserves. Despite the emphasis on psychology and characterisation, Michael Gilbert—as much a master of the genre that Nicholas Blake—does not neglect detection or clueing. The clues discovered by Ken Manifold relate directly to sadism, being clues of character and clues of opportunity; while those discovered through workmanlike police detection are believable and realistic clues. An excellent school story, effortlessly combining the innocence of childhood with the depravity and cruelty of the adult world—one of his triumphs.
Nothing epitomises the changes in the detective story more than a comparison between Nicholas Blake’s A Question of Proof (1935) and Michael Gilbert’s The Night of the Twelfth (1976). Both are school stories, and in both the victims are children. In Blake’s book, a boy is strangled—brutally and quickly—and thrown into a haystack. There is a credible reason behind the motive. In Gilbert’s book, on the other hand, the child is tortured to death—murder for sadism, and off-puttingly graphic, the author “speaking quietly and with a lack of emphasis which seemed to make the words he was speaking more horrible”.
As the book progresses, however, the tone gets lighter and more humorous—it is worth putting up with the disturbing opening chapters to reach Gilbert’s amusing and well-drawn depiction of a prep. school setting, with believable students, and entertaining depictions of lessons and of games. One of the masters, Kenneth Manifold, is an undercover policeman, both keeping an eye on Jared Sacher, the son of the Israeli Ambassador, who could be under threat from the P.F.O. (and certainly not without reason, for what right have the Jews to occupy Palestine?--no, I am not anti-Semitic, as my sympathies lie with the Arabs in this matter), as “any servant of the Israeli State who lives or moves abroad is a target” (very topical this—Israel has always been in the news); and attempting to discover which of the four well drawn masters is the sadistic murderer. The theme of intrusion of violence into the secure world of childhood—almost a passing of age ritual, mirroring the problems of adolescence—is well handled without cliché: “There's violence everywhere in the world. It’s increasing and it will go on increasing. Nobody who is young today can expect to go through his whole life without meeting violence. By coincidence you have run up against it twice in the last few months. It could be useful, or it could be harmful. That depends on you.” Gilbert sees schoolmasters as people who have never grown up, who have attempted to “lock the gate … shut out the disturbing influences, and live for ever in an innocent cloud-cuckoo land among people who never grew up.” Common problems of boarding schools crop up: corporal punishment is attacked as being “all bound up with sadism and sex”; while homosexuality / paedophilia is also ascribed to sadism, as “it’s nothing to do with [boys’] bodies. It’s psychological. It’s based on sex. And sex is based on sadism. And they're both an extension of the power complex.” Sadism itself, or “cruelty for the sake of cruelty”, while “not a common disease” is a “very unpleasant one when it does occur”. Michael Gilbert memorably draws a relentless portrait of inhuman evil, bringing about an ending surprising, depressing, and disturbing, with a genuinely evil and horrifying murderer disclosed after a genuinely edge-of-the-seat chase, “a game of blindfold chess … played across the board of the English countryside”; the one flaw being that the true villain does not get all he or she deserves.
Despite the emphasis on psychology and characterisation, Michael Gilbert—as much a master of the genre that Nicholas Blake—does not neglect detection or clueing. The clues discovered by Ken Manifold relate directly to sadism, being clues of character and clues of opportunity; while those discovered through workmanlike police detection are believable and realistic clues.
An excellent school story, effortlessly combining the innocence of childhood with the depravity and cruelty of the adult world—one of his triumphs.
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