Wed 4 Apr 2012
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review: SIMON TROY – Waiting for Oliver.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[3] Comments
by Bill Pronzini
SIMON TROY – Waiting for Oliver. Macmillan, US, hardcover, 1963. Originally published in the UK by Gollancz, hardcover, 1962.
The work of Simon Troy (a pseudonym of Thurman Warriner) is distinguished for the eccentricity of its plotting, characters, and construction. Most people in a Troy novel aren’t “normal”; they are obsessed, perverse, secretive, profoundly different.
So, too, the situations in which they find themselves. This is true whether Troy is writing tales of psychological suspense and horror, like Waiting for Oliver, or what might be termed “psychological procedurals” featuring his sensitive Cornish policeman, Inspector Smith. All of Troy’s novels — even the few that don’t quite work — are quietly disquieting and absorbing from start to finish.
Waiting for Oliver is probably his oddest book. It is the story of a frightening, almost symbiotic relationship between two men who have known each other since boyhood: Oliver Townside and the narrator, Alex Monro.
Oliver is the dominant personality, a personification of evil, a kind of modern vampire who, spongelike, absorbs the personas of those around him, corrupting or destroying them. Alex has always been terrified of Oliver, has always hated and pitied him, and yet has always responded to Oliver’s hypnotic power and done his bidding. When they were children, he could not bring himself to expose his friend/enemy as the perpetrator of unspeakable acts of violence.
Nor could he bring himself to seek personal vengeance as an adult, when Oliver maliciously seduced Alex’s sweetheart, Margery, married her, and later cold-bloodedly murdered her.
When the book opens, two years have passed since Margery’s “accidental” fall from a cliff near Petit Sant, Oliver’s home in the Channel Islands. Alex, a teacher in a small secondary school in England, has had no contact with Oliver since then and prefers to keep it that way. But when he receives a telegram announcing Oliver’s intention to take a second wife — Frances, another woman Alex knows — he is drawn back to the islands.
It is then, while once more waiting for Oliver, that he realizes he cannot let the man marry Frances, for surely he will murder her too. He sets out to do what the local police have not been able to do — prove that Oliver killed Margery — and also to free himself from Oliver’s thrall, if necessary to destroy the evil before it destroys him.
The suspense here builds slowly, inexorably, to a terrifying climax on one of the smaller islands. And as a bonus, Troy portrays the Channel Islands (as he does all his settings) with a sharp eye for detail.
The novel does have its flaws: its eccentric construction makes things seem confusing at times, especially in the early pages; Troy withholds vital information about Oliver’s and Alex’s boyhood until much too late in the book; and there are minor points that seem a bit too quirky, that don’t quite ring true. Still, this is a powerful and unsettling work.
Also well-worth investigating is Troy’s only other nonseries psychological suspense novel, Drunkard’s Walk (1961), and his ten mysteries featuring Inspector Smith. Among the best of the Smith novels are Second Cousin Removed (1961), Don’t Play with the Rough Boys (1963), and Cease Upon the Midnight (1964). The last-named title also has a Channel Islands setting.
Under his own name, Troy/Warriner also published a series of novels featuring an outspoken private detective named Mr. Scotter, none of which has been published in this country.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
Previously on this blog:
THURMAN WARRINER: Method in His Murder, reviewed by Bill Deeck.
April 6th, 2012 at 1:50 am
Bill Pronzini’s review is excellent. It shows that Simon Troy is an underrated author. It was in the nineties that I picked up the book by chance and read it at once. I was so much impressed with the description of the atmosphere of the Channel Islands that I wanted to go there on my next holiday. Later I changed my mind and did not go. I can’t remember why. But the novel is still present in my memory.
April 6th, 2012 at 2:19 am
I have not read this one, but I enjoyed reading Road to Rhuine, an Inspector Smith mystery, when it was reprinted in the country by Perennial Library in paperback. (I couldn’t resist the title!)
I have also read one of the mysteries that Thurman Warriner wrote under his own name. I will have to go looking for the review I’m sure I wrote of it.
I wonder how many people have read this particular one. You might feel that the lack of comments — other than yours, Josef — would be significant. But since very few have said anything about the Dan Marlowe book, either, the one reviewed just before this one, the lack of response probably doesn’t mean very much.
If it’s a “classic,” though, all things considered — even with two solid yeses in its favor — I think it’s an all but unknown one.
April 6th, 2012 at 10:31 am
Steve, you are right, this novel cannot be a classic, but it could become a cult novel for the “happy few”. It was also published in France and Germany, probably in some other countries too. Troy’s “Don’t Play with the Rough Boys” was published in the legendary Série Noire.