PETER DICKINSON – The Yellow Room Conspiracy. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1994; paperback, 1995. First published in the UK: Little Brown, hardcover, 1994.

   Dickinson is one of the few writers in the field who can be counted on to furnish a really different book with almost every outing. About all one can count on is that it will be literate and well crafted; which, come to think of it, is not too shabby a promise to keep.

   Thirty-six years ago a man died in a fire and explosion. Now, two aging lovers, one slowly dying, decide that it is time to uncover all the things that have been hidden. Each has believed over the decades that the other had murdered the man who died, and now that they know that neither did, decide to recreate the past that led up to the tragedy.

   The story ranges from the playing fields of Eton to the movers and shakers of post-WWII Britain, and centers around the five beautiful Vereker sisters, of whom the dying woman was one.

   The publicity material describes this as “complex, clever, and absolutely chilling,” and yet again I am amazed at the I-hope-not-willful inaccuracy of the people who write these … things. Complex and clever, yes, but nothing here is even remotely chilling.

   It is a mystery — in a sense — and the mystery is solved — after a fashion — but more than anything else it’s a re-creation of a time and way of life now vanished, told in a literate and leisurely fashion. Dickinson is a superb prose stylist, and a master at the creation of characters who are memorable. I’m reminded again that although the lines between genre and non- often blur, sometimes the distinction is clear. This is a novel, and a very good one.