There is no mystery here: William Marble, in debt with no prospect of getting out, is visited by his nephew Jim Medland, who has enough money sticking out of his wallet to settle all Marble’s debts. Marble poisons him with the potassium cyanide from his photo-hobby chemical cabinet and buries Medland in the back yard.
Forester’s story is the disintegration of Marble and his family from the guilt and fear of discovery that bears down on Marble and the eventual torment he feels at every moment he cannot be guarding his back yard.
The problem Forester faces is the pettiness and utter banality of his characters, an unimaginative blahness that his tale necessitates. He chooses not to treat Marble with a light touch or any irony—at least until the last couple of sentences. He bears down on the hopelessness of Marble’s mean and limited view and the inevitability of his fate. Martin Edwards writes in The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books about Forester’s treating his subject with “sharp, disdainful prose,” but my impression is that the disdain makes for a painful read, and the prose suffers from what Yvor Winters called “the fallacy of imitative form.”
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