Alfred Hitchcock's Tales to Make Your Blood Run Cold Anthology II Book

The book is really two interwoven stories, one taken from the diaries of Betty Jackland, a young women newly arrived in 1920s Nigeria as the wife of a British colonial official, and the second following her son Ted as he tries, 60 years later, to make a documentary of sorts based on the diaries. The diary half is better, I think: Dickinson does a really good job of finding an interesting voice for Betty, effectively showing her increasing self-confidence as she finds her feet in a strange country and steadily asserts her independence from her husband. Despite the fact that we are in principle reading a record of what Betty is thinking and feeling, he nonetheless manages to keep us guessing as to what some of those thoughts and feelings really are. The depiction of the intersection of the court politics of imperialism, with British district officers (and Betty) scheming against each other to install their preferred Emir, with a more modern style of mass politics, albeit one carried out in a primitive-seeming register, is also very well done. Plus, Dickinson is good at the semi-anthropological description of the Kitawa (who are, I'm pretty sure, entirely his invention) that makes up a chunk of the diaries: he has a knack for subtly bringing out the sophistication of what a modern reader would think of as a rather primitive people. And the fact that we know that something terrible happened at the end of the period covered by the diaries -- the Tefuga Incident that gives the book its name -- ensures that a certain measure of suspense is maintained throughout.

The modern chapters don't do quite as well, partly because Ted's position, that of a famous journalist and filmmaker spending a short time in Nigeria to shoot a few scenes for his latest project, simply isn't as interesting as his mother's. He is, like the reader, trying to work out what really happened during his mother's time in Nigeria, but while this detective work adds interest to the diary chapters, the fact that all the events happened sixty years prior removes the suspense from his half of the story. So Dickinson works to add some, using post-colonial politics, which makes sense but doesn't quite work out because the continuities with the colonial politics of the diary chapters aren't established as firmly as they could be. In the end, he falls back on a military coup, which, though realistic for Nigeria, isn't all that interesting. The final revelations, not just of what actually happened at Tefuga but what came afterwards, still pack a punch, though. "Tefuga" is an excellent example of Dickinson's expansive view of what a mystery novel can be.