A Case in Camera

About the book

In May 1919, friends gather at painter Philip Esdaile's studio to celebrate his success and the approaching wedding of two members of their circle. Their breakfast is interrupted when two men descend by parachute onto the roof after an aircraft disaster. One is dead, the other survives, and the narrator announces that the death involves a killing by someone who still claims to have been the victim's friend. From this unusual premise, Onions develops a mystery concerned with what witnesses notice, withhold, and gradually understand. The intimacy of the artistic household complicates any simple division between investigators and interested parties. Its postwar setting also makes wartime experience part of the background against which civilian conduct and personal obligation must be judged.

• Friendship and responsibility
• Evidence and concealment
• Life after war

Why read it

The narrator discloses the central moral problem early, making the interpretation of events as important as their discovery.

English text of the March 1921 Macmillan edition