With My Little Eye

by Roy Fuller

Teenager Frederick French is attending a trial in his father's courtroom when a gunshot is heard and the plaintiff falls dead in a pool of blood. Amidst the confusion, Frederick catches a glimpse of someone who may be the killer and who appears to be a hunchbacked dwarf. He decides to play amateur detective to try to get to the bottom of who killed the man and why, but the list of suspects is the victim's grieving widow, a phony medium, a failed poet, a seedy solicitor, and a sinister figure known as Dr. De'ath. But what starts out as an amusing adventure soon turns much more serious, and by the time Frederick realizes he is in far over his head it will already be too late ...

The first of the three classic crime novels by poet Roy Fuller, With My Little Eye (1948) is an intriguing, fast-paced crime thriller that can be enjoyed by adults and younger readers alike. Fuller's thrillers The Second Curtain (1952) and Fantasy and Fugue (1953) are also available from Valancourt.

Genres: Mystery

188 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1948

About the author

Poems (1939) was Roy Broadbent Fuller's first book of poetry. He also began to write fiction in the 1950s. As a poet he became identified, on stylistic grounds, with The Movement. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University 1968-1973.

Reviews

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Goodness, what a bizarre book. It started so well and so normally. Very engaging, great characters, great plot. Then it went seriously weird. Any one of the weird elements would’ve made it weird, but there were multiple weird elements. It actually became a bit like a hallucination. Like a fever dream. It’s somewhere between a three and a four star. I could’ve given it either. It is part detective story, part thriller, part curio. I have a horrible feeling this one will haunt me and I will come back and give it four stars.

[Derek Collett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first book in Roy Fuller's 1940s/1950s 'crime' trilogy and far and away the one with the most crime in it (the other two don't contain much at all).

With My Little Eye is about a teenage boy, Frederick, who is the son of a County Court judge. One day in his school holidays, he accompanies his father to a sitting during which the plaintiff is shot and killed by an unknown assailant who escapes from the courtroom before he can be apprehended. Unimpressed by the police inspector brought in to investigate the shooting, Frederick sets out to try to crack the case himself. After a series of increasingly perilous adventures, he succeeds.

When this book was first published, a reviewer observed that "Only an adult will... be able to savour this delightful book to the full" and he was absolutely right as With My Little Eye is up there with most 'adult' thrillers I've read in the last few years. Frederick is an endearing hero, and he finds that doors are flung open for him because of his youth and innocence, doors that would perhaps remain closed to others. His father, with his cynical, world-weary demeanour and witty utterances, is a notable comic creation and my only complaint in this regard is that he does not play a large enough role in the story. The minor characters are well up to snuff and there are lots of memorable set-pieces, especially an ingenious, thought-provoking sequence set on a race-course.

When I first read this book several years ago I felt that its final third suffered badly by comparison with the first two thirds because the story descended into improbability, and became frankly unbelievable. I now see that I was wrong: the final stages of the book do hold up to scrutiny and there is a logical, plausible explanation for all the events recounted. As one would expect of a poet, Fuller writes with beautiful precision and economy but also with a delicious wry humour. So this book is thoroughly recommended, and deserves to be both better known and more widely available than it is.

[CQM · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book apparently aimed at young adults, here referred to as "older boys and girls", which takes a short while to pick up speed but once running doesn't let up. I particularly enjoyed the spiritualist meeting and being deceived by one of the characters into thinking I was reading a Victorian melodrama. The hero's dad is a giggle too.

[Jack Heath]

Synopsis: the teenage son of a judge helps solve a murder which takes place in his father's courtroom.