Payment Deferred by CS Forester Review

It was a dark and stormy night…

… when a nephew, fortuitously flush with cash, that Mr Marble didn’t know he had appears on his doorstep, just when he’s up against it with bills he can’t pay! Desperate, Marble is seized with a wild idea of murder - an action that sets him on a doomed path of further pain and misery.

CS Forester was best known for his naval books, both fiction and non-fiction, with his Hornblower series being his most famous work. But before he wrote that he tried his hand at crime thrillers, the first of which was Payment Deferred - and it was really good!

The characterisation of Marble is the first striking thing about the story - he’s such an incapable, unlikeable cad from the start and only gets worse as the novel progresses, and yet he’s compelling to follow for all his personality faults. But Forester also doesn’t waste time getting the plot going and, after the initial murder, he continues to escalate Marble’s woes quickly so that one awful thing moves onto the next (his “payment”, or punishment, is deferred - until it isn’t), making for a brisk, entertaining narrative - and, because Marble is such a bastard, we don’t mind seeing him increasingly suffer either.

You could say that the plot is convenient in that when Marble needs to make a lot of money quickly he’s able to shake himself out of his usual funk to do some dazzling - and highly illegal - insider trading at the bank he works in. Was the fact that he’d become a murderer the prompt he needed all along to become successful in his career or could he have done it sooner, to thus avoid killing anyone in the first place? But I can understand why Forester did it this way - it’s more fun to read about someone’s fall when that fall is as high as possible.

Similarly, I found myself wondering why Marble did nothing about the corpse buried in his backyard flower bed. Given how incriminating it is, why not dispose of it instead of leaving it there forever? But again, it needs to be present throughout as it’s also a metaphor for the story: much like a flower bed holds the potential of containing multitudes of beautiful flowers, the money Marble gains throughout via crooked means could bring happiness and yet doesn’t - his life only becomes more barren and desolate, like the corpse flower bed that becomes the centre of his world.

My only real criticism is with Forester’s prose, which is a little clunky at times. I’m not sure if it’s because of the era - the novel was published nearly 100 years ago - or Forester’s youth (he was in his 20s when he wrote it), but there’s a significant amount of description interspersing the action that slows the narrative down, and it’s often filled with awkwardly-written lines like this:

“Money was always useful; and at the back of Winnie’s mind there was a half-formed plan, in carrying out which she would find it more than useful, she expected.” - p.165

Doesn’t quite hit the ear right, does it? It kept causing me to re-read lines which interrupted the flow of the story.

Speaking of the era the story is set in, it’s interesting to see details that must’ve been everyday to his audience of the 1920s but today stick out as unusual. Like the fact that apparently £5 notes were so rare that they were traceable to people who owned them(!), that there was a post delivery at 9pm(!!), and that cyanide was used in early photography(!!!), which explains why it was so readily available in Marble’s house (he was an amateur photographer).

I’ve never read CS Forester before and didn’t know what to expect with Payment Deferred, but I can see why this brilliant example of British noir is in the Penguin Modern Classics range. I really enjoyed it, and I will definitely be reading more of Forester’s crime novels - worth checking out if you like early 20th century crime fiction.