The Chelsea Murders

First Edition.
In the basin was the head. One of the detectives picked it up. Only one of the blue eyes was closed in a kind of leery bedraggled wink. The man looked at the face for a moment, and put it back in the basin again.’ One glimpse from Lionel Davidson’s The Chelsea Murders is all that may safely be revealed in advance of the bizarre circumstances in which the most exciting and original murder story for many years is played out. In choosing his last novel, The Sun Chemist, as ‘beyond question the book of the year, the Spectator pointed out that every one of Davidson’s masterly books, going right back to The Rose of Tibet, is completely original, invariably surprising and beautifully written. There is nobody in the field to touch him.’ Now again, with his first murder story, he must be placed beyond comparison.
Totally fresh, ingenious and tantalizing, The Chelsea Murders chillingly observes the activities of a killer through a series of short, rapid takes, like camera flashes. As the press toys with words such as ‘maniac’ and ‘siege’ and the police try frantically to avoid the sort of slip-ups that distinguished Lord Lucan’s disappearance or left the Cambridge rapist so long on his rounds, we watch the killer evading them with taunting playfulness. But who is this killer, seemingly in full view of both the police and the reader? At every turn of the story we are invited – indeed baited – to guess at the identity beneath the mask, and just as consistently outwitted.