Maxwell's Movie by
M.J. Trow
pbk out August 98
(NEL)
at £5.99
A well-crafted plot, believable characterisation and a mesmeric setting for the final unravelling of the mystery make this a book to be savoured. The action is seen through the eyes of its chief actor, and highly unusual sleuth, Peter Maxwell, passionate historian, equally passionate film buff and Head of Sixth Form at Leighford High School, a large comprehensive in a southern county. (I suspect Hampshire).
In a moment of peculiar disaffection with school routine Mr Maxwell, Mad Max to pupils and colleagues, organises a trip replacing a chemistry test for thirty-one pupils of the Museum of the Moving Image. They are to be in the charge of two members of staff, Anthea Edwards and newly qualified teacher Alice Goode, plus two Sixth Formers as whippers-in, one for the girls and one, Ronnie Wallace, for the boys, with Maxwell himself as team-leader. Alas for human cunning and organisation. Maxwell is struck down with influenza. The group must go without him. And somewhere in the eerily shape-shifting, mood changing depths of M.O.M.I. Alice Goode and Ronnie Wallace disappear.
Did they disappear separately or together? Intensive searching and eventually police investigation fail to come up with any answers. The two seem to have vanished like smoke. Maxwell knows that he cannot logically be blamed but he had been the organiser of the trip. Would this have happened had he been present? He feels irrationally guilty.
When WPC Jacqui Carpenter, uneasy at the lack of police action in the case, breaks confidentiality and gives him information he should not have, Maxwell feels compelled to get involved. She knows of assaults on two other girls, one murdered, one left mentally scarred, which she suspects, without proof, are linked but her senior officer is not listening. All seems at a dead end until the body of a young woman wrapped in line is found in the car-park of a country restaurant near the Devil's Punchbowl. It is identified as the missing Alice. Max, grieved at the ugly death of a young, innocent and apparently respectable teacher, is angered and puzzled that the restaurant-owner should regard her as a worthless prostitute. Meanwhile where is Ronnie? Is this his doing? Maxwell begins in earnest to investigate on his own account.
The investigation leads him into some very nasty byways of human low-life indeed. In his crusade he is insulted, threatened and badly beaten-up. But he persists and, because he has a kind of specialist experience that the police do not have at first-hand, he eventually gets his man.
A humane book, full of shafts of humour piercing the gloom of its underlying tragedy. Its chalk-face knowledge of the world of present-day state education is horrendously convincing. Maxwell, for all his ferocity and braggadocio, is a genuine knight in shining armour, an embittered idealist thinly disguised as a cynic. And even the kids aren't all monsters. Some, he admits are "tolerably human".
Maxwell's Movie by
M.J. Trow