The Cinema Murder (1917)

THE CINEMA MURDER (1917)

The First World War is thankfully forgotten in this 1917 novel of murder, flight, ambition and love.
Readers of crime fiction may find some prefiguring of Peter Lovesey's excellent The False Inspector Dew in this stirring adventure.
A poverty-stricken young art teacher and would-be playwright, Philip goes to meet his equally poor girlfriend who works in a foul mining village as a teacher, a position that is ill-paid and soul-destroying.
United by the hopelessness of their lives both she and Philip live in real poverty and misery of spirit; they even discuss crime as a way out of their dilemma.  On this visit Philip finds that he has been supplanted by his wealthy cousin. He murders the cousin by a canal and taking the dead man's identity flees on a liner to America.
On the liner he meets Elizabeth, a celebrated American actress who asks him to write a play for her. The story of the murder reaches the liner and Philip is forced to evade questions and temporize about his new identity.

In New York he books into a fine hotel in the cousin's name and then disappears to hide under a second pseudonym in cheap lodgings. He maintains contact with Elizabeth and his play is a huge success. However exposure of his true identity seems certain to occur as he is repeatedly questioned by a detective and others.
Elizabeth has her own past that threatens the couple's future happiness and Philip's former girlfriend arrives in New York knowing of his crime and threatening exposure...
Oppenheim (while ultimately seeming to evade charges of outraging contemporary morality) gives us a picture of people who are quite happy to commit and/or excuse murder when the circumstances of their life would seem to offer no other route from hopelessness.
Although this is slightly more excusable than Patricia Highsmith's Ripley it is portrayed with an equal matter-of-factness.
8.5/10