A perfect example of why writers should show not tell

Finished Jane Gardam's Old Filth a little disappointed - throughout I admired her copious imagination and at times her very fine writing - e.g., the description of OF's sea voyage to Asia, his drive to the north of England to visit his estranged cousins - and felt she did a good job telling a tale out of narrative sequence. But: she does seem to lose control of the thread of her narrative as the novel progresses. You really get the feeling that she is inventing as she moves along - that she does not at any one point have a clear sense of the arc or the design of the novel as a whole. Her strong imagination and writing facility become her own enemies, allowing her to get away with narrative short cuts that lesser writers couldn't handle. I can see now why OF is the first of a trilogy - material begets material, and she can no doubt fill two more volumes with episodes from OF's life. Still, I think she owes us more in this volume, which ends with a thud as we see OF as a young, struggling lawyer, with very little money and few prospects, a victim of the idiotic caste system in English law where the senior lawyers rule at "inns of court," when his old traveling companion Ross (aka Loss) enters and offers him a gig in Hong Kong - clearly, this just points toward the next volume, rather than wraps this one up suitably. Bigger concern is how Gardam handles the central mystery of this novel: what happened that was so horrible among OF and his two cousins in the foster home they lived in in Wales? We learn at the end (spoiler here, obviously) that the three children actually killed their terrible foster mother (Mrs. Dibbs?). Now that's a pretty juicy bit of info to hold back till the last pages - and I don't mind a novelist holding back the goods - however, this is as good an example you'll ever see of "show don't tell" - rather than actually present those events from OF's POV, as she does so well with other parts of his life, Gardam presents all this info in a letter OF receives from his cousin - what a flat and cheap way to present this dramatic material! Aside from the extreme unlikelihood of one's putting all this info into a letter in any case, ever after, or especially after, 75 years! Who knows I may read the next volume - OF was easy to read, moved along nicely, I do have a little curiosity. But I also feel a bit cheated - like someone just hit me with a watery decaf after a fine meal.