Can I be altogether alone in finding [A Coat of Varnish] a cheat, a crime if you like? It uses all the devices of the detective novel only to abandon the reader in the end to uncertainty and a damp sense of inconclusiveness that resembles nothing as much as bad sex.

Snow's narrative skills are intact. The story line pulls us forward, wanting to know the answer, the reason for all the explanations, all the biographies, wanting, above all, a solution. And that, of course, is what the detective novel of whatever kind must provide. Closure may have vanished from the higher modern literature. The sense of an ending, as Frank Kermode suggests, may be in abeyance. But not in the detective story….

But what if Snow's whole point is that, civilization being but a coat of varnish, order and justice cannot be restored, the answer cannot be...