The author’s haunting and highly readable fictionalisation of a high-profile killing in prewar Liverpool is rich in legal and procedural detail

In 1931, William Herbert Wallace was first convicted and then acquitted on appeal of the murder of his wife, Julia. Her killer was never found and the case remains one of the most pored-over mysteries of the 20th century. Crime novelists including Dorothy L Sayers and PD James have written essays and books about it, and none other than Raymond Chandler, who knew a thing or two about unsolvable wickedness, described it as “the nonpareil of all murder mysteries... I call it the impossible murder because Wallace couldn’t have done it, and neither could anyone else.” Why would anyone murder an apparently nondescript, harmless woman? Anthony Quinn has now turned his attention to the case in his new novel; the result is intensely readable and, appropriately enough, indelibly haunting.

Quinn’s masterstroke is not to focus on Wallace himself, a middle-aged insurance company collection agent who lived in Liverpool, but to invent a new character, Detective Inspector Key, who plays chess with Wallace and is drawn into the case as much through his friendship with the accused man as for professional reasons.