A review by robinwalter
The Click of the Gate by Alice Campbell

lighthearted mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

This is the third Alice Campbell novel I've read. It's also the one that has left me the most confused. The first one I read, The Murder of Caroline Bundy was a densely written psychological mystery that I found slightly heavy going. The next one I read was her debut, Juggernaut, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Trying to sum up how I feel about this one is itself something of a mystery. 

Like the other two, this story highlights Campbell's impressive writing skills, especially in creating  vague, ill-defined and unsettling menacing atmospheres. For the first quarter of the book I found myself tempted to skip pages simply because the atmosphere Campbell was creating was truly uncomfortably tense. Had the story remained like that it would have been a gripping thrill ride. Instead, it lurched into farce. 

The mystery in the story concerns the disappearance of a young girl. The girl's mother is planning to divorce her husband so that she can marry the lead protagonist of the story. This English fop takes the lead in the investigation and dominates the story for the last three quarters of it. 

Every detective in mystery novels has their own shtick — Poirot has his moustache and little grey cells, Holmes has his misanthropy and deductions, Wimsey has his monocle and anti-Semitism, Queen has his racism and patronising superiority complex. The detective in this story is more remarkable for what he does not have — sentience. 

From the moment when he took over the investigation into the girl's disappearance the story was literally farcical. It was hard to comprehend how anyone could be so utterly and comprehensively stupid. It seemed likely that were there to be another murder the protagonist would be the victim and the cause of death would be having been beaten over the head with too many clues. Up until the last 10% of the book I wasn't sure if Campbell had deliberately made this character so devoid of intelligence that he makes an amoeba look like an intellectual giant, but then she had this clodpated character say this: 

“I,” he said, “am a mulish simpleton. You might as well know it now as later. I have luck, but few brains.”

Clearly, Campbell deliberately wrote the world's dumbest detective. Hence my confusion. 

I am genuinely not sure how I feel about this book. It started off promising to be a dark, tense and gripping thriller, then swerved into a farcical comedy of errors. The outworkings of the plot, including the identity of the villains and the "surprise" reveal toward the end, were all so obvious and so blindingly telegraphed that there was no sense of threat or malice left in the story. 

From what I know of Campbell's gift for writing, it is possible that she was lampooning the gad-about gentleman detective so popular at the time she wrote this. A more cynical assessment might be that she was getting paid by the word and turned a 50 page novella into a full-length novel by creating a detective constitutionally incapable of deducing that the sun will rise the next morning. Because I'm feeling generous, I'll opt for the first option and applaud her parody.