The Bellamy trial

Here is a triumph of the mystery writer's art. It's not a detective novel, strictly speaking, since no detective is on hand to chart a course through the dense jungle of clues that mark the story's terrain. But there's evidence aplenty, and plenty of scintillating dissection of that evidence, and woven around all of it is a gorgeously complex plot, fashioned from the actions and passions of recognizably human characters. The tale begins when the eponymous trial does-after a Long Island prosecutor has determined that Stephen Bellamy and Susan Ives should face a jury of their peers for allegedly stabbing to death Mimi Bellamy, Stephen's wife and the putative lover of Susan's husband. The prosperous country towns of Rosemont and Lakedale, where these attractive young people pursue their respective fates, recall the East Egg and West Egg of The Great Gatsby (1925), and indeed the country-club milieu of the Bellamys and the Iveses bears an echo of the world described in many stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. (This novel, like those stories, first saw publication in The Saturday Evening Post.) The tale itself draws inspiration from the notorious Hall-Mills double murder of 1922. That case, like this fictional one, unfolded in the exurban wilds outside of New York City and involved a pair of love-wracked couples, startling fingerprint evidence, and the dramatic late appearance of a surprise witness. Out of such elements, Hart spun into being the first legal thriller of any note-the progenitor of every "witness for the prosecution" and every "presumed innocent" suspect who came afterward. Except for a final, revelatory scene in the chambers of the presiding magistrate, the "action" of the novel takes place entirely inside a courtroom.