The Man Who Looked Back - Joan Fleming

THE STORY:  Anti-social Roy Unithorne has personal issues with the entire world. He dislikes his pleasant amiable, utterly harmless wife, Amy and is resentful of her friendships, especially with their boarder Islay Brown, a nurse at a local hospital. Roy begins to fantasize about Islay, imagining her a possible romantic partner. But she is repelled by him. Roy decides to "improve" himself by beginning an exercise regimen running along the beach every day.  Islay finds this amusing and she and Amy talk about Roy and his fitness kick.  Then Amy disappears.  Is she dead or did she leave Roy?  He tells two different stories to two different groups of people. To his new landlady and her daughter he says that Amy died suddenly. To the people he rents his home where he and Amy lived he says his wife became ill and went to live with a relative in Scotland. Why the two stories? Is either true? What really happened to Amy?

THE CHARACTERS: The Man Who Looked Back (1951) is Fleming's fourth novel, the second to be published in the US and it indicates a new style of crime novel for her, one that she would perfect in the 1960s. Like The Deeds of Dr. Deadcert (1955), her eighth novel, it is an inverted crime novel focusing on a criminally minded individual with a narrative emphasis on his thoughts and behavior. We mostly follow Roy's point of view though we do also get interruptions with the introduction of Islay and her fiancé Joe who become accidental amateur sleuths determined to find out the truth about what happened to Amy. Other minor characters also appear in various interludes. Fleming drops very subtle clues in these sequences about what happened to Amy Unithorne.

Roy is one of those fascinatingly odd characters that Fleming does so well in making believably eccentric and simultaneously creeping out the reader with his obsessions that ultimately will bring about his downfall. Living in his own world and fancying himself the object of desire of nearly every woman he encounters Roy goes about constructing plans for these women.  When they fail he sees the women at fault never himself, constantly perceiving his interactions only through his own skewed imagination without ever seeing those women as who they truly are.

Joan Fleming
(publicity photo circa 1966)

Lucy Shiplake, his landlady's daughter, is perhaps even more fascinating than Roy because we first learn that she finds Roy extremely odd and yet wants to find out why he seems so unhappy.  She makes him her "project" testing the waters by first teaching him to how to play chess, getting progressively closer to Roy with each new discovered pastime.

And yet Roy is still resentful and cannot appreciate Lucy's kindnesses. He has been snubbed by Islay who he foolishly proposed to in a scene that has a surprise for both Roy and the reader. He feels humiliated and explodes into one of his nasty fits and forever changes Islay's opinion of him.

Interspersed between the story of Roy and his women, we get several scenes with his boarders the Joneses who are baffled about the alternate story Roy gave them about Amy; marvelous scenes involving Roy and his landlady Mrs. Shiplake resulting in his destruction of a curtain that has terrible consequences for Roy and the Shiplakes; Joe and Islay's amateur detective work; and the late introduction of a police duo known only as Inspector A and Sergeant B who begrudgingly find themselves conducting what at first seems a routine missing person case but turns into a surprise murder investigation.

INNOVATIONS:  Apart from the unusual shifts in point of view I found Fleming's clever insertions of clues related to Amy's disappearance to be the most original part of the story.  And several amusing scenes dealing with the Unithorne's daffy neighbor Mrs. Parker and her obsession with Amy's cat Arthur who has been prowling around the local coal delivery company. Mrs. Parker is determined to capture Arthur and take him in as her pet.  She is worried about the animal which seems to be wandering around aimlessly taunting both her and the workers at the coal company.  Arthur enjoys spending an awful lot of time in two locations: in the branches of a tree overlooking Roy's flower and herb garden, and on the high roof of a building overseeing the coal cars at the factory. These scenes prove to be Fleming's most clever method of slyly indicating that the cat was a witness to some foul deed involving Amy.

Also, the book has a "howdunnit" element in that it takes the entire length of the book to discover exactly how Amy was killed and the body disposed of. In fact, there are multiple deaths and a couple of attempted murders. Although the clues related to Roy's highly unusual method are not really inserted into the story until well past the halfway mark Fleming has some unconventional scenes between Joe, a university medical student specializing in forensic medicine, and his mentor Dr. Giles Bangor, in which they discuss the possibility of poison. Suspecting Roy to be a murderer they indulge in some armchair psychology to figure out exactly what kind of poison he would select. Usually, I find this kind of pop psych to be risible in works of fiction, but here Fleming makes it seem not only logical but thoroughly believable.

For those who enjoy the works of Minette Walters, Ruth Rendell and even Patricia Highsmith I would highly recommend The Man Who Looked Back as an fine example of psychological suspense that those three other writers were masters of.  Joan Fleming in her early career was just as innovative as those three better known writers. Her work is unjustly ignored these days. At the height of her popularity when the books were first published she received accolades from fellow mystery writers turned reviewers like Anthony Boucher and Dorothy B. Hughes as well as numerous newspaper reviewers both in the US and in her native England. She ought to have remained in print as long as Highsmith, IMO. Luckily, her books were reprinted by the thousands in mass market paperbacks and you can still find most of her books, including this one, for cheap both in brick and mortar stores and online. Do yourself a favor and check her out!