Returning from a night out, Ted and Marjorie discover Marjorie’s sister Dot dead in the kitchen - head in the gas oven, the gas on. Did Dot take her own life - or, as Marjorie begins to suspect, was her husband Ted somehow involved…
CS Forester’s The Pursued is another of his British noir novels, similar to Payment Deferred - and it’s a decent book though not as good as that one.
The first 50 or so pages are great. Forester wastes no time in setting up the premise. I especially liked how he jumped around in the heads of the different characters, even Ted’s, without giving things away about whodunit. Which is good because Marjorie is a bit of a damp squib, so the variety of seeing the story from her perspective, Ted’s and Mrs Clair, her mother, keeps the story engaging.
What’s inspired is Mrs Clair herself. A grandmother, I initially wrote her off as the old biddy that’s always in stories’ backgrounds, but she quickly becomes the best character in the story as she realises her son-in-law killed her youngest daughter and is making her surviving daughter’s life a misery, and decides, well, if the law won’t punish him, then I’ll just kill him myself. What an awesome old biddy!
Then the novel slows down considerably for about a hundred pages when we have to slog through a rather soppy romance. I know why Forester chose to do this - to give the actions of the final act a believability - but it was still dull to get through. The story picks up again in the remaining pages as the inevitable confrontation with Ted happens and the title makes itself clear.
This novel has a strange origin story. Forester wrote it in 1935 and sent copies to his US and UK publisher but asked they hold off on publishing as his nautical adventure series Hornblower was hitting big and he thought this dark crime story appearing in between Hornblower books would seem weird to his audience. Then the manuscripts went missing for the rest of the author’s life - he died believing they were forever lost. A copy re-emerged in 1999 at auction, it was bought, and, after some legal wrangling, was finally published in 2011, 76 years after it was written!
Part of me wonders if it wasn’t initially published because it could be seen as derivative of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, which had been published the year before and has a very similar story (although this story has been done before many times by other writers, and also been lived out in real life like in the Ruth Snyder case in the 1920s).
Although, what sets The Pursued apart from Postman is the inclusion of the third character, Mrs Clair - it’s not just the two lovers, Marjorie and George, being left up to decide what to do about the unwitting husband, but also the grandmother character, who actually masterminds the whole thing. And it’s Mrs Clair’s revenge plan that’s the most intriguing part of the story, as I kept reading to find out how exactly this old lady would take him out.
And while the story is unpredictable for the key moments, the ending is disappointingly predictable because I feel that the morals of the time meant that you couldn’t tell a story where criminals get away with it. Even though, ironically, it’s the morals of the time that led to such a situation - apparently even though Ted beat up his wife and kids, because he was being cucked by his adulterous wife, he’d still get to keep the house, his job and custody of the children, while his wife would lose everything and her boyfriend would lose his job! Ah, the good old days eh? When nothing made sense…
The novel could definitely be leaner but I did enjoy parts of The Pursued and it’s a solid crime novel - Forester’s both a strong storyteller and writer. And it’s always good to see lost manuscripts being found and published, regardless of it not being among their author’s best work. If you want to read a better CS Forester noir story, Payment Deferred is the one to check out, and if you want to read a better version of The Pursued, I recommend James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice.
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