Pick Your Victim (1946) by Patricia McGerr
Good Reads meta-data is 191 pages, rated 3.70 by 20 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: Office.
Verdict: Nah.
Tagline: More island, please.
Its unusual set-up is the whole game. A group of soldiers on a remote Aleutian Island in 1943 are desperate for diversion. Amid the newspaper packing of a rare mail delivery, they read a fragment about the confession of murderer of a co-worker stateside. Turns out G.I. Joe used to work for that perpetrator in that very same office.
The gambler in their midst suggests a pool in which they guess who the victim was, since that was not in the shard, and before they do this, Joe will tell them everything he knows about the confessor and the others in the office. He will also write home and ask for the identity of the victim. Hence the title. They listen and choose from among the possibilities as Joe tells all he knows for pages and pages.
There is nothing about life on the Aleutian outpost and the bulk of the story is office politics. It is competently told but not compelling for those of us who skip pages and pages of ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ that neither move the plot nor develop character.
The sexism of the time and place is choking. All the women are girls. (The took refuge in Pat rather than Patricia.)Though I did like the admission of one corporate vice president upon appointing an incompetent that no one objected when when the incompetent was a man. But try appointing a competent woman and the objections are an avalanche. Has anything changed?
Krimi deans Barzun and Taylor included in their 50 crime classics for its unusual set-up. It has nothing else to recommend it.