The Silent European Quarter
In just the third paragraph of his story, barely a full page into it, the author describes the European Quarter of the Malay city in which the story is set as “quiet, trim, neat and clean.” In another story, this imagery might indicate mere European colonial superiority, but in this this story it serves a far greater and insidious purpose. The imagery of the European section of town as orderly, reserved and well-managed is pure foreshadowing for the shocking revelation at the end in which the descriptive sentence opening that third paragraph takes on a whole new meaning: “The European Quarter is very silent.” Yes, it is. The Europeans know when to be quiet to protect their own. Not to mention taking tidiness to a whole new level of connotation.
The Expert Shuffler
The woman in the middle of the love triangle leading to murder is first introduced to us through the narrator’s initial meeting. That meeting is marked by a peculiar incident: Mrs. Cartwright is revealed to possess the deck-shuffling talents of a slight-of-hand artist. The very first image the narrator has of Mrs. Cartwright is of a woman shuffling cards. Very quickly she proceeds to demonstrate her flair. Keep in mind that Mrs. Cartwright was at one time Mrs. Bronson and she managed to shuffle her position from being widow of a murdered man to wife of the man who took over her dead husband’s business with aplomb. The unspoken, but quite implicit suggestion is that Mrs. Cartwright’s true flair for shuffling her marriage status might have gone undetected by those being misdirected.
The Best Looking Woman
An astonishing amount of time is given to describing the physical appearance of Mrs. Cartwright. More specifically: noting the difference between how she looked when her first husband was murdered and how she looks at the time the narrator arrives. No less than two full—and rather lengthy paragraphs are devoted to imagery that describes first how the police investigator recalls her looking twenty years earlier and how the twenty years since have affected change. The police chief ends his recollection with the assertion that she might have stunning, but even without making that effort she was still the best looking woman on the island. This recollection is at odds with the description of the current state of Mrs. Cartwright two decades on from the murder. The opposition images created here serve to underscore the assumption that can be made from imagery of her expert card-handling. Perhaps the policeman investigating her husband’s murder might have been quicker to reach a conclusion if he hadn’t been blinded by her beauty then the way he seems to be blinded by her and husband’s “pleasantness” now.
Very Decent Murderers
Make no mistake: the police chief is convinced that Mr. and Mrs. Cartwright conspired to kill her first husband almost twenty years earlier. And yet, the most lasting and disturbing imagery in the entire story is reserved for his conclusion of the tale as the story comes to a close. In response to the narrator’s wonder at how he can stand to be so familiar with two people he believes to be cold-blooded murderers, the police chief takes offense to the narrator’s assumption that they can’t possibly be nice people. On the contrary, the image of these unrepentant, unpunished, unredeemed cold-blooded killers provided by the policeman is that they are not just nice and amusing, but “just about the pleasantest here.”
