Last week, I came across a piece by Sarah Lyall in the Times about an English mystery-writer, Janice Hallett — I hadn’t heard of her — who has much of spent of her life as a writer-for-hire, with a specialty in beauty-aid copy. When Hallett tried her hand at screenplays, she was urged to write a novel. The result was a bit success in Britain. Intrigued, I ordered The Appeal, which came out in 2021. While I can’t imagine how it could be adapted for film, I am fascinated by Hallett’s successful overhaul of the classic Agatha Christie model.
As is the case with those great entertainments, not much can be said about The Appeal without spilling clues, so this will be brief. The first thing to note is that the omniscient observer, dribbling out details about the weather and the library wallpaper, has been dismissed, leaving us with a mass of first-person email and text. The unreliability of this evidence is palpable, as the smiling ironies of unwitting self-disclosure cavort like cherubs over the surface of suspicious testimony composed by people whose eyes have not really read what their hands have written:
Marianne: Stay safe, Joyce. Don’t get involved.
Joyce: I won’t. I’m on my way there now (128)
When another woman, the hyper-organized Sarah-Jane MacDonald, is obliged at one point to dictate a text while driving, the resulting garble is such fun to read — her son, Harley, is referred to as “Harlem” — that I hoped that Hallett would repeat the stunt. Later, Sarah-Jane replies to an importuning text by writing, “You were standing right here only moments ago. Why not just speak to me?” (218)
This stream of communications is produced by the members of an amateur theatrical company in the West of England, plus assorted friends and relations. Currently in production is Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. Hallett’s choice of play here is not insignificant, but it could really be anything, since it is gossip about casting and rehearsals that elicits the email, a topic that is presently joined by an awful crisis, the need to provide very expensive treatment for a cancer victim that inspires a crowdfunding campaign. Gossip’s virtuosity at converting unpremeditated “whoppers” into established truths will provide the attentive reader with more than enough amusement to forestall the tedium suspected by one of the more copious email writers, who says at the end that it must have been “boring to read so many words.”
When I wasn’t thinking of Jane Austen or Mrs Gaskell, I had Wilkie Collins in mind. In The Moonstone, Collins gave the world the unforgettable creature, unforgettably named as well, of Drusilla Clack, whose misapprehensions about the welcome of her proselytizing almost make her bearable. More than a few of the contributors to The Appeal would die of congestive blushing if they could read the novel through our eyes. Better yet, they might die of shame at having quite literally walked onstage naked.
To corral the morass of inputs, Hallett has framed them in a series of chats between two young lawyers, or “clerks,” who have been assigned by their boss to read it all with fresh eyes. The boss (a QC) has come to have second thoughts about the conviction in a case that he prosecuted a while back, and he has chosen to test his hypothesis by distributing the evidence in select tranches. There is a good deal of information that he withholds from his juniors at the start, but in the end their agreement with his hunch shows that the evidence supports a more compelling conclusion than the easy, obvious one. Nothing is more satisfying — this hasn’t changed since Christie’s day — than having figured out who done it before the final pages. The cover of my paperback edition urges you to try. So do I.