Call the Witness

Edna Sherry

By guest reviewer Nicholas Litchfield, editor of the Lowestoft Chronicle

A NEWLY minted partner at a prestigious law firm must fight for his reputation and freedom when he stands trial for his wife’s murder in Call the Witness, a taut 1960s crime novel steeped in small-town suspicion, legal intrigue, and simmering class tensions.

First published by Dodd, Mead and Company in January 1961, Edna Sherry’s evocative standalone legal drama returns to print this month as part of Stark House’s Black Gat mass market series, emerging from more than sixty years of obscurity.

The Cincinnati-born writer, renowned for her gift for suspense, is best remembered for the 1948 thriller Sudden Fear, adapted into a film noir starring Joan Crawford and now regarded as a genre classic. In Call the Witness, she displays her sharpest instincts, drawing inspiration from a notorious real-life case that unfolded across the Atlantic in Liverpool thirty years earlier. Whereas her post-war contemporaries often featured stock characters and familiar plots, Sherry’s work pulses with psychological edge, subtle social critique, and a relentless sense of tension.

Ashley Lawson, an Edgar Award-nominated author, notes in the book’s introduction that Sherry ‘writes about people rather than situations, and most of her characters are fully-fleshed, complex, and believable,’ singling out the novel as ‘key evidence in our case that this author deserves greater recognition.’

Set in the insular city of Ambria, the novel introduces us to Bartley ‘Bart’ French, a hardworking and ambitious lawyer from Montana. Newly appointed as partner at Newton and Newton, a firm where ‘status and lineage’ count for more than merit, Bart yearns to belong. His wife, Kay Whitlaw, is described as ‘lively and loving’ but their marriage is overshadowed by her patrician family’s disapproval and the compromises they have both made.

Bart’s mentor, Sam Ballard, with his ‘mobile, humorous actor’s face,’ faces risky brain surgery, leaving Bart anxious but determined as he inherits Sam’s workload and coveted black notebook of contacts, shouldering the firm’s most sensitive cases… and the secrets that come with them. Around him orbit Arthur Newton, ‘affable, sociable in a surface manner,’ Andrew Clayton, ‘reserved and competent,’ and Bill Peck, ‘a brash, well-connected charmer.’ In Ambria, the gates never truly open for outsiders.

The story takes a dark turn when Bart, sent on a wild goose chase to a fake client’s house, returns home with his neighbour Jerry Slater… and finds Kay brutally murdered. The town, hungry for scandal, turns on Bart with swift malice.

Police Captain Miles Eliot sizes up Bart as the likely suspect, while the local newspaper fans suspicion with a jab at Bart’s alibi, calling it ‘so suspiciously perfect that any modern author of whodunits might hesitate to use it.’ Supporters, like his colleague Lil Slater and employer Arthur Newton, defend him while Martha Whitlaw, Kay’s mother, furiously asserts that ‘He did it and he’s going to pay for it!’ The murder weapon – a poker found in the backyard – tightens the noose and whispers seem to speak loudly. ‘Ambria’s a beautiful town… but… a man could come here, live here the rest of his life and still be an oddball.’

Bart’s trial is pure theatre, a spectacle where old grudges and whispered judgements take centre stage. District Attorney Fuller paints Bart as a cold-blooded killer while the defence, led by sharp New Yorker Arnold Cass and steady Andrew Clayton, hunts for cracks in the prosecution’s story. Jerry Slater, whose testimony undermines the prosecution, and Agatha Willett, a secretary who injects personal bias, reveal a community as divided as its courtroom, while Cass’s cross-examinations turn the state’s case inside out.

Meanwhile, Bart sits frozen at the defence table, stripped of the buoyant energy that once set him apart. He’s a man watching his fate draw in, minute by minute…

Full of taut exchanges, dry wit, and an overwhelming sense of dread, Call the Witness is a hard-hitting tale of justice and belonging… where the real verdict is delivered not only in court, but in the hearts of a town that never quite lets a stranger in.
(Stark House Press, paperback, £10.95)

⬛Nicholas Litchfield is an English-born author and journalist who lives in Western New York. He established the Lowestoft Chronicle, a quarterly online magazine, in 2009. It  publishes short stories, flash fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, interviews and artwork.(lowestoftchronicle.com)