Mr. White's Confession

Mr. White's Confession
By Robert Clark
Picador, 1998. 341 pgs. Mystery

Murder mysteries can be disturbing due to the murder in the story. This murder mystery is disturbing because of the travesty of justice subsequent to the murder. The story is set in 1939 in St. Paul, Minnesota. Mr. White is an innocuous man in his 30s who has a hobby of taking pictures of pretty dance hall girls. When one and then two of these dance hall girls are murdered circumstantial evidence leads to Mr. White's arrest, confession, conviction, and imprisonment. Now Mr. White suffers from a mental condition where he cannot remember anything except the most recent events and the one's most distant in his past. To compensate for this he keeps a meticulous record of his daily activities and scrapbooks of newspaper clippings of important world events. Mr. White's "confession" is, of course, coerced.

A second story line follows Wesley Horner, the arresting officer, who comes to realize and regret that a mistake has been made. An interesting and unusual exploration of the relationships between past and memory.

SML