The Truth Will Not Help Us by John Bowen (1956)

 This is an unusual book - not from the point of view of style, which is probably the more common peculiarity, but instead in the much rarer oddness of content. Bowen was one of those authors who debuted in the 1950s and seemed to be of the coming generation of notable writers in the 1960s, but who then dwindled, for lack of a better term. This was the debut. Its basis is the true story of the unfounded accusation of a ship's crew in Leith in 1704 of piracy. Just before the act of union, with tensions very high on both sides of the border, the English crew of the Worcester were falsely accused of piracy, a sham investigation was instituted, and three of them (including the captain) were hanged as a result. They were soon after discovered to be innocent (as they had all along claimed) with the discovery of two sailors from the pirated ship in London, who had been hitherto assumed dead, murdered in far-off lands. These sailors had no knowledge of the Worcester, and had never heard of Captain Green. Bowen utilizes this scenario to flesh out his main target, which is the House Un-American Activities Committee, its falsehoods and poor process. But, in the undertaking of melding one scheme into the other for allegorical purposes, he makes a strange decision: 1950s Leith, with its televisions, buses and suburban living, takes on a 1704 mantle. Fully rigged sailing ships come into the harbour as they would have done two and a half centuries before. 1950s-in-almost-every-other-respect Scotland is independent, and an ally of England in a long-running war, with a lot of tension between the two all the same, echoing the first decade of the eighteenth century. It's an odd amalgam, but somehow, I guess because the whole thing is pointedly conceptual, and the writing feels quite airy and free, it works within its curious frame. The matter-of-fact explication dives off into case histories of the crew, a maladjusted local merchant who owned the vessel which had been lost, presumed pirated, various locals who take impounded crew members in, or lambast them with prejudice. He also plays with the para-legal 'investigation' concept, and how it was used on one hand to abjure strict legality ("this is NOT a trial") and on the other to condemn the sailors with pitifully inadequate evidence, with much fuddling and double-talk, which is where the HUAC target is sighted. The 'investigation' is perhaps a little too hampered by unbelievability - shoe-horning 250-year-old process, and modern American paranoia, into 1950s Scotland is a push. Some of these addled nonsenses would not have been tolerated in that context. But the fun he has with the darkness possible in ordinary suburban worlds is entertaining, if not as subtle as it could have been.