Word: fingal
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Barty Fingal, a stringy bit of town scum, and his pal Pelancey, a handsome but dim-witted giant, find a compromising letter in a jacket sent to Pelancey's dry-cleaning shop. They decide to blackmail the man who wrote it, and their scheme is so successful that the poor fellow commits suicide...
Prepared Destruction. From there on, the novel moves with accumulating speed. Ratty little Fingal begins to tremble for his skin. He has "gone too far into evil ... a climax towards which his whole life in its indolence and evil has been foolishly shaping." Pelancey is gnawed by deeper fears: his clumsy conscience eats at his heart. "I'm warning you, Barty," he says, "you can't get rid of it. It's done . . . Only thing to do is to put up with it, and say nothing...
...their fears unloose their tongues. Fingal and Pelancey are soon suspected by several people: Pelancey's clerk who overhears their quarrel; his devout cleaning girl, who drags the truth out of him and urges him to confess; Barty's shrewd old mother; and the dead man's former mistress...
Having prepared their own destruction, Pelancey and Fingal are finally driven to half-ludicrous, half-pathetic efforts at confession and penance. Perhaps the worst of it, for Fingal, is seeing himself in his true identity, "in all its shabby unworthiness." Pelancey learns his bitter bit of wisdom: "What's the sense in running away, when you know that at the end o' the journey you'll meet yourself...
...occasional lapses into stilted novelistic clichés, and its too convenient ending which veils coincidence with the appearance of fatality. But for the most part, Mist on the Waters is as good as a first-rate movie thriller. With somebody like Barry Fitzgerald playing the part of Barty Fingal, Hollywood could have a story to work with...