Book Review:

Unrelenting mystery monger

Carl Muller

I am introduced to Uncle Arthur - a non-nonsense Civil Servant with a yen for detective fiction. He is brought to us by Medical Professor Mahasara Gunaratne, Senior Commonwealth Fellow and Academic Historian.

It had been a pleasure reviewing two of his earlier works, Lilac of the Tabebua and Cliff House Mansion. It was the setting and the style that told of a writer who was fairly glued to the past, expressionism and all.

Before me are two books: Uncle Arthur Mysteries, mind, and the typical old world patter puts Uncle Arthur exactly where and how he should belong - a lovable pursuer of the improbable.

What is so special is that Professor Gunaratne takes past and present and revels in “Old Ceylon’ as he calls it. Also, it would appear that he is the recipient of the Uncle Arthur fantasies - but how much of this fantasy occupies each story is hard to define.

Take Doomsday set in December 1941 with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. It shifts to the “Death Valley Railway” that Uncle Arthur is also to know of and that infamous Burma Railway takes me back to Alistair Wilson who never wished to tell of it even after he married Christine Spittell.

It had to be old Colonial Ceylon when in 1945, Uncle Arthur refuses to take “no” for an answer. He had to find Malcolm and Clifford - or were they both the same person?

Readers will enjoy this book as the chain runs from Colombo to the North Central Province - and if Clifford lay buried in his grave, was Malcolm still alive?

The second Uncle Arthur Mystery is Between Two Wars - again set in Colonial Ceylon with Philip Freudenberg, Imperial German Consul for Ceylon - and there is Frank who simply disappears. True, Frank was a new recruit in Uncle Arthus’s Civil Service office, until he went missing. This stirred our recreational detective. Where was his favourite “gentle Frank” who spoke in whispers and never missed a day’s work?

Arthur set the ball rolling: German spies and operative, the seizing of Frank who was held in a Colombo hotel.

Do read on, because what we have are two well-nursed books that tell us just about a much more believable fictional detective than King Arthur ever was.

It also works out a plot that could never be involved with the rubbish spewed by the artificial romanticists six hundred years ago.

At best we had a legendary king who could not control his wife and raised a round table rally like a stormy petrel. What a load of disgraceful artifice was resorted to. Here, on the other hand, is Uncle Arthur - quite a king of his own making - who with dogged determination, binds together the threads of a story that carries all the suspense, adventure and mystery that the author has so devotedly pieced together.

There will always be the genre of detective fiction. Historic fiction is also taking seven-league steps and is greatly appreciated. In these books we have full doses of the detective role in history.

One question remains. It is known that today there has begun to surface many Neo-Nazi movements that can cause much to worry about. Were there such assemblies that could come to Colombo in the early 1990s to take away by force or guile those who were needed to fight the British Expeditionary Forces? How many of these captives lived... and how many died?

And in 1950, in Salzburg, when all the fighting was over, was it a limping “Franz” who came to two persons, helped by his chauffeur, and held out his hands to them? Or was it Frank - the leader of a Luftwaffa squadron, shot down over Dresden?”

One can never know - but Uncle Arthur sensed it all and knew the meaninglessness of war!