Murder Through the Looking Glass by Andrew Garve
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"A substantial part of Warsaw's population, including regiments of children, seemed to have been marshaled on to the bleak, windswept platform. They stood in orderly files behind a screen of security police [...] holding aloft red banners inscribed with such slogans as 'The Peoples' Democracies Strive for Peace' and 'Ban the Atom Bomb'"

Andrew Garve's (pseudonym of the British journalist and author Paul Winterton) Murder through the Looking Glass (1951) begins with the Warsaw scene quoted above. A British "peace delegation" gets on board of a train to Moscow to demonstrate support for the peace-loving, people-friendly Soviet rule in the U.S.S.R. The narrator, a British journalist, George Verney, is already on the train which he boarded in Berlin. Having spent several years in the Soviet Union during the war, fluent in Russian, Mr. Verney is on a new journalistic assignment, and he welcomes his fellow travelers with quite an unease as he has seen enough of the Communist regime in his past. By the way, the author revels in his brilliant literary pun of having a group of "fellow travelers" become fellow travelers of Mr. Verney.

The non-criminal aspect of the story is really interesting and the author manages to convincingly present a bunch of characters deluded by Soviet propaganda: some of them may even be well-meaning. But this is a crime mystery, so we have a murder: an important member of the delegation is found dead, his head bashed with a bottle. Our narrator who happens to be the first on the scene discovers some clues. We witness his private investigation that parallels the one conducted by the infamous MVD (successor to NKVD). And, obviously, it is he who eventually discovers the truth.

The entire criminal thread and the private investigation in particular are rather ridiculous, and a reader may infer that the functionaries of MVD are almost like regular police in other countries, only slightly corrupt and inhuman. The mechanisms of widespread, systematic torture and killings of millions of people in the Soviet Union are not mentioned, except for one gentle allusion, even though Stalin is still wielding his monstrous power.

Other than the crime plot, I liked the story as I could easily recognize several aspects of the Soviet life. I too departed for Moscow - more than once - from the same train station in Warsaw. I also have always made fun of Soviet phraseology and in particular of the "stormy applause" expression ("Бурные аплодисменты"), and I also learned how to open a bottle of vodka by smacking its bottom hard. I too had to stay in several Soviet hotels and experienced the "protection" of floor manageresses, the search for recording bugs in the furniture, and the ubiquitous radio loudspeakers tuned to the official propaganda station. My visits to the U.S.S.R. were in the 1970s however, so it is funny how little things changed between 1951 and the end of the 1970s.

Bottom line, a readable book, if we do not pay too much attention to the crime plot.

Two and a half stars.

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