The Mouthless Dead, by Anthony Quinn

 

"It was a mask -- one that he wore so determinedly it became his other self." 

9780349146928

Abacus/Little, Brown Book Group, 2025

274 pp

hardcover 

(read in April) 

I don't remember how I happened upon this book, but I was hooked from the moment I read the blurb and knew I had to have it.  For one thing, it turns out to be a novel based on the brutal murder of Mrs. Julia Wallace that happened back in 1931, and I love historical crime, both fact and fiction.  The other thing that piqued my interest is that I had never heard of this case before, so while I was waiting for my book to arrive from the UK I spent quite a bit of time doing some research.  It was a case which Raymond Chandler regarded as "unbeatable. It will always be unbeatable" and about which he  also said that it was an "impossible murder because Wallace couldn't have done it and neither could anyone else."   So now I'm hooked and my book isn't even here yet.  By the time it actually arrived I was already primed, ready to dive in, and I was not disappointed.  

This post will be shorter than usual, because I don't really want to say too much  about what actually happens in this book  -- to tell too much is to completely ruin things, and I don't want to be responsible for that. 

  The murder of Julia Wallace took place at her Liverpool home one night while her husband William had gone to call on a potential client.  William worked for Prudential Insurance, and one night while at his chess club, he had received a message about a phone call from a Mr. Qualtrough, who had asked Wallace to meet him at his home.  The address was also left on the message, and William made his way from his home to the meeting.  He left his house and caught a tram to the area, but never actually got to the Qualtrough home -- it seems that the address was incorrect, and he spent quite a bit of time asking for help from a policeman and other people in the area, none of whom had heard of a Mr. Qualtrough.   Frustrated, he made his way home, only to find his wife dead.  There was no apparent motive, and yet despite what seems to have been an unshakeable alibi with witnesses and the assurances from neighbors that the Wallaces were quiet people who were not inclined to argue, the lead detective zoomed in on Wallace as the prime suspect.  He was arrested for the murder and sent to trial, where he was found guilty and sentenced to hang.  Not too long after the verdict however, the court of criminal appeals overturned the conviction and Wallace was set free, with the murder left unsolved.   By the way, none of this is spoiler material -- just a very brief outline of the actual case. 

The Mouthless Dead  begins some fifteen years later, and one of the former members of the Wallace investigation team, a now-retired Detective Inspector Key who had served as a Liverpool policeman for "nigh on thirty years,"  is on board an ocean liner sailing from England to New York.  He is in the process of putting together a memoir about his career, which would have been "quite unexceptional," except for the one case "that was, in its time, wildly notorious, and had become in the years since the material of legend."  He makes the acquaintance of two fellow passengers, Lydia Tarrant, "somewhat plain" and traveling with her mother, but interested in his stories, and Teddy Absolom, a younger man in his twenties, for whom "film had been his obsession since boyhood." Teddy hopes to look for work in the industry in New York, or maybe even Hollywood, where he's interested in writing and directing.  Lydia reveals to Teddy that Key is writing about the Wallace case in his memoir,  and Teddy admits to having been "obsessed with it as a schoolboy."  Teddy believes that "the hand of fate" must be at work here, because the case would make a great movie with "the lot" -- "a brutal killing, a police force baffled, a man condemned to hang."  Never mind that  there was "no ending"  -- according to Teddy, it wouldn't be a documentary, but a drama based on a real-life story, much like Hitchcock did with his movie "Rope."  And thus it begins, with Key holding Teddy and Lydia spellbound with his continuing story.   Key is only too happy to oblige helping Teddy, unable to resist showing off his insider knowledge.   

Julia and William Wallace, from The Julia Wallace Murder Foundation

 In the Acknowledgments section of the book, the author notes that he "owes this book to a conversation" he'd had that had "triggered" a childhood memory. He remembered his parents talking about it once,  likely because  his family had lived very close to Menlove Gardens, where Wallace was supposed to go to meet the mysterious Mr. Qualtrough.   As he says, "the story came out like a revenant from the darkness of forgetting, and I knew I had to retell it."   The author's done a great job here, bringing in the historical record of the Wallace case complete with police work and materials from the trials,  solidly landing the reader back in 1930s Liverpool.  However, the real genius at work here is that the retelling is offered to us via the fictional Key's perspective, suffusing the narrative with an unexpected intensity, so much so that I could not put this book down.  

The Mouthless Dead is both a gripping, engrossing tale and a keenly observed study of character, one that I can recommend very highly to readers who enjoy historical crime fiction or well-written, intelligent crime novels.  It's also a book I won't soon forget.