For the #1940Club: Verdict of Twelve by Raymond Postgate

I have to say that I usually struggle with British Library Crime Classics.

I am constantly seduced by their beautiful cover art only to be bored to tears by plots that rely almost entirely on things like train timetables. 

So it was with some trepidation that I picked up Verdict of Twelve, and I probably wouldn't have picked it up at all if it hadn't been published in 1940. I'm so glad that I did.

Rosalie van Beer is on trial for the murder (by poisoning) of her nephew Philip. Rosalie ('daughter of a tobacconist in the Wilton Road, Pimlico') 'married up' in 1918, just before her new husband departed for the Front. Robert, youngest son of Sir Henry Arkwright, was posted as missing five months later and never seen again. Sir Henry had been outraged by the marriage, but made Rosalie the Widow an allowance on the basis that she must never communicate with him again. 

Rosalie remarried, but her new husband was a complete waster who was then killed in a car accident (whilst in the company of a young woman not his wife.) Meanwhile, Sir Henry's only surviving son, Arnold, married and became a colonial officer in South Africa. When Philip came along, his parents sent him to boarding school in England; holidays were spent with Sir Henry in Devon. 

When Arnold and his wife were killed in a plane crash on their way to visit Sir Henry, the old man  immediately died of shock. His fortune therefore passed to Philip, to be held in trust for him until he came of age. The trustees were Sir Henry's lawyers. If Philip died under the age of 21, Mrs van Beer would cop the lot. 

Rosalie has now moved into Sir Henry's ancestral pile and appointed herself guardian of Philip, whom she has taken out of school; he is now taught at home by a private tutor. She has constantly fussed over the child's health and his behaviour, and it must be said that Philip is not a nice boy. He hates Rosalie, she dislikes him; they live in a state of mutual antagonism, supervised by Mr & Mrs Rodd, Sir Henry's housekeeper and gardener. |

Philip has died of ivy poisoning. Was this added to a salad by the evil aunt? Was it added to the salad by Mrs Rodd, who stood to gain a small financial payment under the terms of Sir Henry's will? Or was it imbibed by Philip himself, either in a failed attempt to kill Rosalie, or a successful one to kill himself? 

The first part of the book is not, however, about Rosalie and Philip. Postgate instead examines the background and character of each member of the jury - and what a variety of backgrounds they have. They include Miss Victoria Atkins, a sour woman whose murder of her wealthy old aunt has long gone undetected, Mr Popesgrove, a Greek immigrant with a shady past, Dr Percival Holmes, an arrogant, idle, unkempt, woman-hating, Oxford don, James Stannard, a kind, hard-working publican, Edward Bryant, an obsessive evangelical Christian who believes he is one of the very few (possibly the only) Chosen Ones, and Alice Morris, who has been widowed by a violent anti-Semitic attack on her much loved young husband. 

In describing the baggage that each member of the jury brings to the case, Postgate shows how impossible it really is for anyone to do as the judge tells them, ie consider their verdict purely on the basis of the evidence, as outlined by counsel for the prosecution and defence. Each one of the twelve sees things through their own particular lens;

'The mind of each juror was like the dashboard of a motor-car....There was in it the equivalent of a dial with a quivering needle above it, calibrated for negative and positive - for Guilty and Not Guilty. In nearly all the heads, if one had been able to look inside, the needle was shaking uneasily about neutral. In one mind...the needle was dead still, fixed to neutral. The machine was not registering at all; it was disconnected.'

'Mrs Morris's....had been decided by considerations very far removed from the evidence....why had her life been ruined and her husband killed? For no other reason then that murder was not punished.' 

Postgate even provides us with illustrations of these 'needles', showing the way in which at least five of them are swinging back and forth. 

And the jurors are not alone in their indecision, for although we as readers can't like Rosalie, we can perhaps have sympathy for a woman who has been buffeted about by life. And at the end of the day, I for one wasn't sure what verdict I would have reached. 

Postgate undermines our preconceptions at every turn. The Rodds are salt of the earth retainers. Or are they?

'Most people who talk of him (the Old Retainer) have never heard servants talk amongst themselves...The word 'devotion', so common in romantic novels, is very rarely applicable to the sentiments there expressed: the 'Family' would be surprised to learn with what coolness its interests are regarded. The Rodds...regarded themselves merely as two persons, reasonably well-rewarded, who had performed very well a skilled task, one of whose conditions was a demeanour of respect and loyalty. Affection entered into it very little.....Rodd had considered (Sir Henry) a rather testy old fool; Mrs Rodd had considered him no more than she considered the black and white cat, whose death the week before had affected her emotionally on the whole rather more.'

The Rodds despise Rosalie, seeing her as jumped up and behaving 'above her station'. Rodd in particular is slacking in his work because he knows she has no understanding of what he should be doing; his chief occupation now is working his way through Sir Henry's wine cellar;

'In the heart of the Rodds, if you could have looked there, you would have found as chief interest the accumulation of enough money to retire to a cottage of their own.'

Similarly Dr Parkes, the elderly doctor whom Rosalie brings in on a regular basis to investigate her own and Philip's non-existent illnesses, knows he is incompetent. When he leaves it far too late to consult a colleague about Philip's poisoning, he knows that he has somehow to cover his tracks.

In other words, every single person has their own agenda. 

The second part of the book covers the trial and the eventual verdict.  I really could not tell how things would go for Rosalie, and was gripped by this story right to the last page. 

Postgate's son Oliver was the creator of such TV classics as Ivor the Engine, The Clangers and Bagpuss, so although Martin Edwards, in his excellent introduction, tells us that Raymond Postgate's other crime novels were unremarkable to say the least, storytelling clearly ran in the family. Verdict of Twelve is a cracker.