Witness for the Defence

A woman is tried for shooting her husband in camp in Rajputana — a brute whom half the station believes she had every reason to kill — and the one man whose evidence can acquit her is Henry Thresk, a rising barrister who once loved her and knows exactly what speaking up will cost him. Mason had been an actor and an MP and would go on to run naval intelligence in Spain; he wrote the story first as a play, and the courtroom scenes still move like a stage. Fifty-nine plates, among them portraits by Edvard Munch and William Orpen, extend the book's study of character under pressure from the Rajputana camp to the wider stage.