Mystery Thriller / Whodunit Classic
Someone Decent
Combining Daphne du Maurier + Dashiell Hammett | Jamaica Inn + The Thin Man
Synopsis
Three narrators recount a weekend death on a fog-bound Cornish headland. The housekeeper saw devotion. The guest saw cracks. The detective saw the answer. None of them saw the same house.
Du Maurier's atmospheric dread and landscape-as-mood merge with Hammett's lean, dialogue-driven investigation in a whodunit set on an isolated headland, structured around Jamaica Inn's trapped-protagonist-and-respectable-villain framework, threaded with The Thin Man's witty social-comedy-as-investigation and the elegant solution that reveals its own irrelevance.
Behind the Story
A discussion between Daphne du Maurier and Dashiell Hammett
We met in a rented house on the Cornish coast, which was du Maurier's idea and, I suspected, a test. She wanted to see whether we could talk about atmosphere without invoking it as an abstraction. The house gave us no choice. It was a squat granite thing backed against the cliff with windows that faced the sea and doors that didn't quite close. Salt had gotten into the wood over decades, and every threshold had swollen into a kind of permanent protest against its frame. The kitchen smelled of…
Read the full discussionThe Formula
- Landscape as psychological state — the fog, the headland, the granite house rendered as participants in the narrative rather than backdrop, with each narrator's version of the setting reflecting their emotional position
- Slow-building atmospheric dread through accumulation of domestic detail, particularly in Judith's sections where the house's routines encode something sinister beneath their respectability
- Lean, externally-focused prose in Gage's sections — character revealed through observed action and dialogue rather than interiority, with the investigator's moral compromise visible in what he chooses not to pursue
- Dialogue-driven scenes where what characters withhold matters more than what they say, especially the exchanges between Gage and Olivia Falk where banter functions as mutual interrogation
- The isolated, threatening location that traps its inhabitants — the headland cut off by tide echoing Jamaica Inn's moor, with the house's respectability functioning as the same kind of prison as Aunt Patience's marriage
- The respectable figure revealed as the true architect of harm, hiding in plain sight behind social position and long-standing community trust
- The investigation as social comedy — Gage's wry cataloguing of performative grief and maneuvering among the wealthy weekend guests, murder as occasion for revealing how little elegance matters
- The elegant mechanical solution that clicks into place and immediately reveals itself as beside the point — the whodunit answered while the real question goes unasked
Reader Reviews
I finished this and sat still for a while. The women in this story carry everything -- Judith carrying eleven years of unspoken loyalty, Olivia carrying a marriage through sheer performance, Petra carrying knowledge of the weak banister she never shared. That line about Olivia's composure being "anger so thoroughly processed into composure that you could only detect it by its effects on surrounding materials" -- I had to read it twice. The fog and the granite and the sealed house all work beautifully to hold the tension in place. And that final smile from Olivia, genuine for the first time in three years. Quietly heartbreaking.
75 found this helpful
A competent exercise in multi-perspective narration that ultimately subverts the very form it adopts. The whodunit apparatus is present -- isolated setting, limited suspects, mechanical solution involving a tampered banister -- but the story seems almost embarrassed by its own genre obligations. Gage identifies the who and the how in a single afternoon, which rather defeats the purpose. What saves it from mediocrity is the prose, particularly in Judith's opening, where the fog and the bread and the granite hum with genuine atmosphere. Petra's section is the weakest -- her confession about knowing the banister was compromised arrives as convenient revelation rather than earned disclosure. The closing image of Olivia's smile is effective, I grant, but the story's insistence that the solution is beside the point feels like an author reaching for profundity at the genre's expense.
68 found this helpful
The architecture of this story mirrors its subject: surfaces that appear solid while something rots underneath. Each narrator offers a version of the house, the marriage, and the death, and the cumulative effect is not clarification but deepening uncertainty. Judith's prose has real weight -- "decent the way the house was granite: all the way through, without variation" is the kind of sentence that does structural work while appearing merely descriptive. Gage's section risks becoming too neat, but the closing meditation on the untouched coffee redeems it. The story's quiet argument -- that the whodunit mechanism satisfies the institutional need for resolution while leaving the actual human catastrophe untouched -- functions as social criticism of a high order. Olivia's smile at Petra across the breakfast table is devastating precisely because the story refuses to explain it.
61 found this helpful
The three-narrator structure does real investigative work here. Judith's section reads like a witness statement from someone who understands institutional loyalty better than she'd admit. Gage's interviews are sharp -- the bit about Whittaker speeding up at the Charity Commission and slowing down about Friday evening is exactly how you read a suspect. My only reservation is that the procedural side is thin. Gage arrives, interviews, solves it, and drives home. In practice you'd have scene-of-crime officers, a pathologist's report, chain of custody for that banister post. But the final question -- whether Thomas was testing the post or had stopped caring whether it held -- elevates the whole thing beyond mechanics.
57 found this helpful
Well-crafted but procedurally implausible. A London detective dispatched to Cornwall on the basis of the family's connections is plausible enough, but Gage conducting all interviews solo within hours, with no SOCO presence, no coroner's involvement, no statements under caution, stretches credibility. The Charity Commission subplot is name-checked but never developed -- Whittaker's motive floats unattached. That said, the institutional critique lands: the Falk Trust as "aggressive philanthropy that functions as reputation laundering at scale" is precisely observed, and the story's central thesis -- that the machinery of justice answers the wrong question -- has real force. Prose discipline is strong throughout, particularly Gage's lean, observed-from-outside narration.
52 found this helpful
A story structured around the gap between explanation and understanding. Gage can identify who tampered with the banister, can trace motives like circuits in a diagram -- Whittaker's financial exposure, Gerald's fraud, Petra's concealment -- and yet his final question (did Thomas lean on the post to test it, or because he'd stopped caring?) opens an epistemological void the investigation cannot close. Each narrator is unreliable not through deception but through perspective: Judith sees devotion, Petra sees entrapment, Gage sees mechanism. The story asks whether a whodunit can accommodate a question about whether the victim consented to his own death, and wisely leaves the answer unresolved.
48 found this helpful
Thomas sitting in his dead father's chair in the dark, not drinking his coffee -- that image stayed with me. The story understands something true about generational patterns: Thomas's rigid goodness as "a form of apology for being alive," shaped entirely in reaction to his father's domineering personality. Olivia's composure read to me as a genuine trauma response, anger processed so thoroughly it becomes invisible except through its effects on others. Judith's displaced thought about the ruined bread when she finds the body is psychologically precise. The mind does exactly that in acute shock.
43 found this helpful
Judith's section hit me hardest. Eleven years working in that house, wanting to tell Thomas "you do not have to be this" and never saying it because she's the housekeeper and housekeepers don't say such things. And then standing over his body thinking about bread. That part felt so real. Olivia is fascinating too -- holding everything together at that dinner party like hosting is warfare conducted through cheese knives. I wished for more of Constance Whittaker, who seems to see everything and say nothing. Really good, just wish it were longer.
34 found this helpful
OK so the writing is gorgeous but where's the actual mystery?? Gage basically solves the whole thing in one afternoon of interviews. I kept waiting for a twist that never came. The three narrators thing is cool and Petra's section had me going but the pacing is more literary fiction than thriller. If you want atmosphere and vibes, great. If you want suspense, look elsewhere.
22 found this helpful