'Move to Murder' may be entertaining, but it is seriously flawed as an attempt to illuminate the Wallace murder.
PD James's 'prank' or 'malicious joke' should never have been considered as a possible solution. For the first time in her long and illustrious career as an author, Baroness James lost the plot! Her claim to have 'cracked the Wallace case' fails because Parry left the 'Pru' almost a year after he deputized for Wallace, and he did so of his own volition, becoming an employee of Standard Life, another major insurer, and to do so he must have had a reference from the 'Pru'. Far from reporting him, Wallace only heard after Parry's departure, from his manager, Crewe, that the Company regarded Parry as 'unreliable'. In late December 1930, Parry gave Wallace a Standard Life calendar, presumably during an encounter in the streets of Clubmoor. Baroness James's reputation is further eroded by the statement that Julia's father was a 'dentist', and that Parry's alibi for the 19th January was 'solid'.
Brown also states that Julia 'made a trip' on December 15 1930 to 'Stockport'. This is a major slip. The actual place was Southport, which was directly linked to Liverpool by rail. This needed much more investigation than Brown gives it. Apparently, she had gone there in the afternoon after William had returned to work from lunch. Since their marriage she had never been anywhere other than with her husband, and he only found out she had been there because an accident on a road crossing had delayed all trains; she got home around 1a.m. Why did she go there, and why did William, who mentioned this event in his diary, never ask her why and what she did there?
It is also critical to the understanding of this murder that when Wallace went out in the evenings he left by the backyard door and used the front door when he returned. On the evening of January 20th, Julia should have bolted the yard door before going back into the house. Wallace was only able to access the scullary door to number 29 because the yard door was not bolted. When he met the Johnstons in the entry, he did not mention this. Perhaps because he knew it would not be. If he had been genuinely innocent he would not have expected to get in through the yard gate.
A further fact that Brown does not explore is that following the post-mortem examination of Julia, the police discovered a one pound and a ten shilling note tucked into a pocket sewn into the deceased's corset. A further blemish on PD James's reputation is that she describes this as 'a pathetic sum of money...' Did she not appreciate that at today's value this was equivalent to £40. What was this sum for, especially as she had today's equivalent of £2300 in a Post Office Savings account - the passbook for which was demanded from the police by her brother and never seen again. To get at the thirty shillings in public she would have had to undress.
Neither does Brown mention at all that the contents of the Police File on this case were withheld from the public for over 70 years. Why? And when one does examine the file, it seems incomplete - as though it had been 'sanitized'. Why were Parry and Marsden never treated as prime suspects although the first had clearly lied to the Police about where he was on the Monday evening, and second had had an insurance client called Qualtrough? And even more importantly, why was Wallace never subjected to tough and penetrative interrogation under caution?
One final isue is that in this book Brown is acting as an historian. He should not therefore venture into writing dialogue that is unrecorded. That is the privilege of the fiction writer. In terms of fact, we cannot know what actors in this drama said, unless it has been reported and is on the record.
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