One of the things I normally enjoy about reading well-written fiction is learning things the author’s research. The number of interesting snippets of information across a range of subjects I’ve picked up is incalculable. In the case of The Case of the Housekeeper’s Hair, however, what I learned horrified and disgusted me so much it served as a massive distraction from the story. 

 

This book was published in 1948, so when I  came across the first mention of German prisoners being bussed to work sites I was thrown for a loop. I went back to check the release date of the book and to confirm that it was set POST-war. Learning that Britain was still keeping hundreds of Germans as prisoners in actual prison camps  and using them as slaves/forced prison labour some three years AFTER the war took my already very low opinion of Old Blighted to even lower depths. That none of the characters in the book considered this flagrant breach of the Geneva Convention and indeed basic human rights as in any way remarkable was difficult for me to process and impossible for me to ignore. Reading of searches and police warnings being issued for “escaped prisoners” who by international law should have been repatriated years earlier was stomach-churning. To the victors, the spoils, I guess. 

 

From the point of view of the story, learning of this atrocity made it really hard to concentrate on the actual mystery. Which was a real shame as compared to Jallianwala Bagh, the Tasmanian genocide and too many others to list, it was very small cheese in the history of British butchery and barbarism, and also because the mystery in this story was a very good one. Travers hears someone pledging to commit the perfect murder, sets off to investigate and hopefully prevent it, only for the would-be murderer to end up the murderee. What follows is a really complex, twisty mystery that is well worth a read for anyone who (a) Already knew of the aforementioned British barbarism or (b) Can move past it in a way I could not.  Since the travesty of justice in question was not the invention of the author, although its reality was central to the plot,  I’m not holding it against the book per se, and am scoring it 4/5