The Belting Inheritance by Julian Symons: Book Review

It isn’t often I laugh out loud on the first page of a book, still less when it’s a detective story, but I did just that when I began reading The Belting Inheritance by Julian Symons. It’s a slightly unusual read for me, a rerelease of a book first published in 1965, which isn’t exactly the Golden Age of detective fiction. It’s set in Kent, where the Wainwright family is much-depleted by the war, and the narrator is Christopher, a poor relation taken in by the family after the death of his parents.

As with all detective fiction I can’t say too much about the plot for fear of spoilers, but it’s based around the appearance of a man claiming to be David, one of two brothers thought to have been killed in the war. His two surviving younger brothers are disbelieving and downright hostile, but their dying mother welcomes him with open arms. And, this being detective fiction, there’s a murder.

I really loved this book. It wasn’t just the plot, which was clever but perhaps not as twisty as the modern reader looks for. It was the characters. Symons captures the idiosyncrasies of family life, and the part where I laughed was where there’s a family joke that caught my attention — and engaged me immediately. The book’s  huge strength is its characterisation, not just of Christopher himself but of its whole cast of fallible individuals, some of them more likeable than others but all of them human. And as the plot goes on Christopher, a somewhat pretentious would-be writer, grows up and becomes an altogether more mature human being.

Interestingly, there’s an introductory note which reveals the author’s concerns that he hung the plot too heavily on a coincidence for it to be a good book, but I didn’t find that. Yes, there was a coincidence, but it wasn’t too crushingly incredible, and it led off on a slightly mad section of the book where everything became very different to the first half. But that didn’t affect my enjoyment in any way — rather the opposite.

The cast of characters was diverse and all were handled well. I particularly liked Christopher’s Uncle Miles, the youngest of the brothers, with his fondness for jokes (especially bad and complicated puns), his genuine care for young Christopher and his tendency to slope off to watch cricket whenever things got difficult (which, of course, they often did).

It’s not a modern detective story, but it was a thoughtful and engaging read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Thanks to Netgalley and Poisoned Pen Classics for a copy of this book in return for an honest review.