British author Andrew Garve’s No Mask for Murder, an excellent thriller, is also by chance a pointed tale for the current moment in U.S. history, though we had no idea when we decided to buy it. We just liked the price and cover. It’s colonial fiction set in a British colony in the Caribbean, which we took to be either Jamaica or Trinidad, but decided was the former because of its capital city Fontego—which rhymes with Montego, and rhyming is conclusive evidence, right?
So let’s get this out of the way—and delicate types can skip this next part. The Spanish and British enslaved more than two million humans on Jamaica, and every year for more than three hundred years these stolen souls died of diseases, punishment, and overwork, all to enrich masters who pontificated about their own brilliant work ethic and superior morals. Therefore, the underpinning of all colonial fiction is this: murder and/or trafficking of people; establishment of a rigid caste and control system; and cruel punishment for failing to obey the system. Those are facts. To the comfort of many in the U.S., they might not be taught for a while, as the latest doomed attempt to suppress equal history grinds away.
In No Mask for Murder, when a graft scheme lures colonial administrator Dr. Adrian Garland into accepting illicit money, he’s willing to kill to protect his position. In his way stand an ambitious assistant and an oblivious witness to his bribery scheme. They’re both black, so must both go. Garland has virtually no pangs of guilt about it. But those murders soon may require more. Subsequent victims would be white. That’s when the pangs start.
Garve achieved exactly what he intended. Every white character here save central couple Martin West and Susan Anstruther is virulently, irredeemably racist. Every black character is imperfect as seen through colonial eyes, therefore unworthy of consideration or survival. A challenge for Garve to write this? You bet. But he kills it by constructing a story of ambition, greed, bribery, and colonial manners in which white characters turn their keen gazes upon everyone but themselves.
The book is seepingly atmospheric, moving from the capital, to majestic coastal homes, to a leper colony, and weathering a mid-narrative hurricane (which you know we always enjoy). Garve sets the main action around his fictive island’s yearly fiesta, which we took to mean Jamaican carnival. During this orgiastic celebration with masks and music the villain just might be able to succeed in his crimes. Other set-pieces resonate too. The chapter where a klatch of cocktail swilling colonials discuss the deficient culture and rampant crime of the island without a single reference to the humans they’ve slain over centuries to allow for their veranda idyll is so cringeworthy it’s nearly comical.
Some vintage authors delved into this genre with no sense of irony or history. They pretended not to get it because they were propagandists for colonial invasion. Not Garve. He doesn’t deal in literalism—at least not here. No Mask for Murder is blunt and demanding, but you can tell that he expected readers understand the extra he’d woven through what could have been a desultory murder tale. Readers that didn’t understand derived nothing from the book, we’re sure. It was first published in 1950, and this Dell mapback edition came in 1952 with art by Robert Stanley.
