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Book Review: MALICE IN WONDERLAND (1940) by Nicholas Blake

4/26/2021

Wonderland is a holiday camp promising fun and relaxation for the whole family: organized sports and leisure activities abound, and there are multiple opportunities to socialize and make new friends. Hundreds of visitors descend on the camp each season, and that means the potential for hundreds of suspects if crimes should occur. And crimes – or at least unpleasant incidents – soon begin to happen. Some visitors are pulled underwater while bathing in the sea; tennis balls are covered in treacle; and under cover of night a pet dog is poisoned and dies. Camp managers Teddy and Mortimer Wise begin to wonder whether the escalating pranks might be leading up to a serious attack on a person, and the vacationing visitors’ response to the work of the self-proclaimed “Mad Hatter” soon moves from curiosity to unease as they wonder the same thing.

Enter private consultant Nigel Strangeways (fairly late in the game, in Chapter 10 of 18) to investigate. Malice in Wonderland, which has also been variously published as The Summer Camp Mystery (the U.S. title), Malice with Murder, and Murder with Malice, is to me an underrated entry in Cecil Day-Lewis’ enjoyable detective series. Strangeways isn’t the only one to put in a delayed appearance; there is a murder in this story, but it only appears near the novel’s climax, and killer and motive are soon identified. Instead, Malice’s pleasures lie not solely with the puzzle but with its agreeable setting, tone, and characters.

While Blake was prone to becoming overly psychological and heavy-handed with characterization in his final Strangeways stories, like The Worm of Death (1961) or The Morning after Death (1966), he serves up a winning cast here. The staff at Wonderland are nicely delineated, whether between the slightly past-his-prime athlete Teddy Wise and his stuffier, more bureaucratic brother Mortimer or in describing the latter’s assistant, a resourceful and attractive young woman named Esmeralda Jones. Front and center amongst the holiday-makers are James Thistlethwaite, a fussy professional tailor who fancies himself a keen observer of people and places (and who may be right), and his energetic daughter Sally.

Sally quickly strikes up an acquaintance with a reserved young man named Paul Perry, and it is their flirtatious, hot-and-cold relationship that is both endearing and authentic. Both of these romantic leads – so often an unwanted and unconvincing element in mystery fiction – are deftly drawn, and it is their contradictions of personality that Blake gets so perceptively right. The two are (like so many young people attracted to each other) alternately cynical and sincere, defensive yet vulnerable, often generous one moment, selfish the next. In Paul and Sally, the author lets the reader feel genuine pathos for the couple and their situation, especially as it appears that Paul is Harboring a Secret and may be more involved in the Mad Hatter madness than he will admit.

U.S. Title: The Summer Camp Mystery

A tone that is often humorous with its details and dialogue, coupled with an intriguing outdoor setting that provides an idyll while a war rages around the world, adds to the book’s enjoyable qualities. And although we are largely focused on the “malice” of malevolent practical jokes instead of a murder investigation, Blake (through his anonymous anarchist) keeps the reader engaged with a busy run of incidents that often just evoke more questions: was a camper’s blistered fingers after a scavenger hunt a result of mustard gas or wild parsley? And if this was another Mad Hatter stunt, then does that incriminate the staff that had organized the search? What of the grudge-holding old hermit living on the outskirts of the camp? And is meek visitor Albert Morley really as bad a shot as he demonstrates at the shooting gallery? The question needs to be considered when a bullet nicks Teddy Wise’s ear as he stands on a balcony, and Albert emerges from the woods below.

For those wanting to take a lively holiday and experience the merry mischief vicariously, Malice in Wonderland is available in print and eBook editions from Agora Books. Les at Classic Mysteries and Margaret at BooksPlease have also posted reviews of this title.

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Mitchell Mystery Reading Group: SUNSET OVER SOHO (1943) - Post #3

4/24/2021

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The Reading Group this week looks at Chapters 13 to 18 of Gladys Mitchell’s challenging 1943 wartime Mrs Bradley mystery, Sunset over Soho. In my initial reading and review of this book more than 15 years ago, I argued that Soho has some qualities that are absorbing and fascinating, while other elements work to create alienation and confusion, resulting in a mixed reading experience. The observations provided by the readers for this section seem to support my analysis.

THE STRUCTURE

Tracy K. from her site Bitter Tea and Mystery encapsulates the plot for these chapters. “Mrs Bradley continues to discuss the events related to David Harben's connection to the dead body found at the Rest Centre in Maidenhead Close with Detective-Inspector Pirberry. Now and then he interjects his reactions to the details of the story, especially questioning whether Harben's story is truthful or not. He suspects that Harben either killed the man or is protecting Leda.”

Joyka adds this context: “Mrs. Bradley, unwilling to call the story told by Harben the total truth, is also unwilling to say it is a totally false tale. Her explanation is interesting: David is telling what happened to him but is using the novelist’s tool of filling in the blanks and providing an ending where there may be none in actual life. Inspector Pirberry is skeptical but he respects Mrs B. to the point of allowing her to detect in her own fashion.” And Lynn MacGrath offers this compliment of the author’s singular style: “Gladys Mitchell packs so much into her pages. She is concise and yet still manages to set the scene and move that action along.”

Joyka says that “the characters are starting to flesh out a bit” in part because Mitchell is finally allowing a glimpse of how the components fit together. She notes that in this section “the Spaniards have been labelled as relatives of Leda, who have lived in the house on the river during breaks from their seafaring. Why they are after David and possibly Mrs B is still murky.” Tracy enjoys the adventure aspect of this tale. “Harben's story of being cast adrift on the sea, ending up who knows where, acquiring a boat to get back, and arriving in England, is somewhat fantastical but fun to read about.” And Lynn M. comments that “the switching from past to present kept my attention focused and added to the atmosphere, especially the dream sequences.”

Still, characterization and narrative structure can prove problematic in this novel for its readers; this was the case for myself and Chris B. this week. Chris comments that he “agrees with Joyka [from last week’s discussion] that Gladys Mitchell’s interest in human character seems to have gone missing: David is a cipher Hero figure, Leda is only a mythological cartoon, and the nearest we get to a human portrait is Plug Williams the shifty Welsh boxing coach.” As for the layered narrative approach, Tracy offers this reaction: “This is a very interesting way of telling a story but I also find it confusing. It is like reading a story (Harben's) within a story (Mrs Bradley's) within a story (Pirberry's) and not knowing if anyone knows the real story.

With Sunset over Soho, Chris perceptively identifies what he terms “the author’s fatal flaw in construction: that of founding the story upon an ‘unreliable’ narrative provided by David while failing to put that narrative into his own voice, which means that its psychological and dramatic potential is entirely thrown away. Instead, his story is relayed at second-hand, and therefore without conviction, by the character who by necessary convention should be trustworthy and credible as to fact.”

Chris continues, “The result is that the sleuth is compromised by glaring sins of omission while the hero becomes a puppet who simply goes through chase-and-escape routines quite perfunctorily. The attempted thriller material is also disappointingly stale and juvenile, as in other novels where Gladys Mitchell resorts to jewel-smuggling gangs or buried treasure. Getting kidnapped by pirates (or here, gunrunners) whose secret then gets betrayed by a parrot is corny comic-strip stuff.”

Which leads us conveniently to…

THE PARROT

Actress Nancy Price (who would have made a great Mrs Bradley) with pet parrot Boney Whiteoaks.

I once wrote that the parrot in this mystery story is used in the way that parrots will be used as clues in most mystery stories, i.e., by uttering a phrase that puts the detective on the track. The talkative bird here is no different, although it takes an esoteric omniscient like Mrs Bradley to fully appreciate the meaning.

Chris helps us again with the references, informing us that “‘No, not Cripplegate’ refers to a possible confusion between two central London churches called St Giles, the first, St Giles Cripplegate, being a medieval church in the City (i. e., East End), in what is now the Barbican district; the other, officially St Giles-in-the-Fields, the 18th-century church that gives its name to the West-End parish of St Giles near Soho. Mrs Bradley deduces that the latter is indicated.”

And that strange single word uttered by the feathered confessor? Explains Chris, “‘Otamys’ in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) – a work from which Gladys Mitchell often quotes – is Cockney for ‘Anatomies’, meaning corpses of hanged men that were consigned to Surgeons’ Hall for use in anatomy classes.”

Obscure as its literary and geographical references may be, the parrot still proves a colorful addition to this story. Joyka explains her affinity this way: “I have to say, I love the parrot whose squawking only a psychoanalyst of Mrs. B.’s caliber could piece together into clues to solve the mystery. The monkey? We have not settled his or her place in the story.”

THE TIME

With Sunset over Soho, Gladys Mitchell chose to place her story within a window of history that is at once contemporary and global when she wrote it. With events being described non-linearly and set against a backdrop of wartime actions occurring between 1939 and 1941, there is by definition less latitude for the chronicler than an author fixing the setting in more general terms.

It is ironic, then, that Sunset over Soho’s disjointed timeline ultimately presents some discrepancies when compared with the real world’s sequence of events. Chris has calculated the narrative times, and this is what he reports. “The start of Chapter 12 had indicated the date of David’s meeting with Leda at the Chiswick house, during which he is concussed, to be late October 1939. Early in Chapter 14, though, we find that David and his mixed crew set off on their voyage from Tenerife to England on 1st April 1940, arriving on the 19th. (This date disagrees with the date given in Chapter 16 for the same event, indicated there to be early April or even late March.) Either way, about five months of historical time, as David confirms at the end of Chapter 14, have somehow slipped by in what cannot be more than a few days in the time of the fictional narrative: the period from David’s rescue to his meeting the English ladies seems to be less than a week. This may be among the reasons for Pirberry to dismiss most of the story as phony.”

Interestingly, Gladys Mitchell may have had a winking reason to schedule the group’s arrival into England on April 19th – the date is in fact the author’s birthday! Some websites (including Wikipedia) say her birthdate is 21 April, 1901, but her birth certificate shows 19 April as the date.

The chronology confusion doesn’t end with the missing five months, however. Chris points to another instance of time out of joint. He writes, “In Chapters 15 through 18 we are still shuttling between Mrs Bradley’s narrative of events in late 1939 (including her investigations once David is reported missing) and her later conversations with Pirberry after the discovery of the body (thus in what must be November 1940). The awkwardness here is that she is no longer telling her ‘story’ reproducing Harben’s version of events but at this stage is telling the story of herself and of Pirberry, referring to both in the third person, and for no obvious reason. The style and voice of the ‘dramatic’ framing in Bradley-Pirberry dialogue are no longer adequately differentiated from those of the inset narrative, as they had been in the poetically-coloured style of Chapters 4 to 7. The entire split-chronology construction,” Chris concludes, “seems to lack clear purpose, and is bungled in execution.” The authorial choices and their questionable effect certainly add to the book’s unevenness.

THE TRAVELS

Tracy comments that Sunset over Soho’s specificity of place, and the details provided within the prose, are very enjoyable, and I would agree. She singles out this passage as an example:

But these were the days before the blitz; before Dunkirk; before the capitulation of the French or the invasion of Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg; before the threat of an invasion of England. All seemed calm, even normal, and out in France an English Field Security Officer stationed at Croise Laroche, just north of Lille, was still keeping fit by doing “the steeplechase course … occasionally in the evenings, on foot, taking all the jumps except the water-jump, while the French A.A. gunners...” jeered at his incomprehensible antics.

The quotation within the text above is actually a source identified via the author’s footnote as coming from My First War, a memoir from Captain Sir Basil Bartlett, Bt. It is clear, if any additional evidence need be provided, that Gladys Mitchell has decided to provide her wartime mystery with as much background verisimilitude as possible.

Lynn M. also enjoys the author’s eye for details, and opines that “the scenes in the pub and the gym are very funny. The list of the goods in Plug’s shop and the description of the room behind it are very convincing.”

Chris chooses two locations, one foreign and one domestic, to discuss further. The first concerns David Harben’s brush with Spanish sailors. Chris writes, “The significance of the ‘non-belligerent’ Spanish boat that rescues David in Chapter 13 is that Spain was officially neutral in the war, although General Franco, recent victor of the Civil War (1936-1939), was sympathetic to Hitler, and offered him covert help. Gladys Mitchell’s evident knowledge of the islands, and of Spanish, suggests that she must, like the oddly anonymous English ladies whom David meets, have holidayed there, which it was still safe for foreign tourists to do during the Civil War period.” Chris notes that Mitchell “would later refer to the islands as a background for one character in Death and the Maiden (1947), and set most of The Twenty-Third Man (1957) on a fictional Canary Island.” The Canaries also feature in the Stephen Hockaby title Shallow Brown, published in 1936.

The harbor of Tenerife in the Canary Islands.

And finally, Chris identifies a literary allusion that pins down some West End geography. “When Mrs Bradley revisits the pub known to criminals as the Cat’s Whiskers, and ‘owns the soft impeachment’ of being a fence (the quotation being from Mrs Malaprop at the end of Sheridan’s The Rivals, first performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane), her thinking indicates that she is ‘between the purlieus of Charing Cross Road and the environs of Drury Lane’. The pub is therefore in the Covent Garden district, south of St Giles. In Chapter 18, she reads up on the history of the St Giles parish and its old street-names, some of which (Broad Street, Maidenhead Close) are anachronistically imported into the novel’s own fictional topography.”

Thank you once more to those who contributed this week, and to those reading along with us. We will learn next week whether readers feel this strange story finishes on a strong note or a weak one.

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Mitchell Mystery Reading Group: SUNSET OVER SOHO (1943) - Post #2

4/18/2021

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We begin this discussion of Chapters 7 through 12 of Sunset over Soho with a helpful summary from Tracy K., on loan from her website Bitter Tea and Mystery to read along with us. “Mrs Bradley tells Detective-Inspector Pirberry the story of David Harben's initial encounter with a young woman, which leads to the discovery of a dead body in a house. This continues with Harben's accounts of what happened after that, further encounters with Leda and some later investigations in the house where the body was found. These events go back to a few months before the war started and continue to a couple of months after the beginning of the war.” Tracy adds, “It is clear that Mrs Bradley is telling the story as it comes from Harben, and both she and Pirberry note that there could be lies and omissions in his story.”

Brentford Gasworks, c. 1950s.

Responding to the natural but forceful perspective shift of this layered narrative, Joyka writes that “Gladys Mitchell is so successful at creating this story within a story that I have to remind myself that Mrs Bradley is retelling the story.” She adds that “three times Mitchell jerks us back to Mrs B and Inspector Pirberry as though she wants to remind us” that it is Harben’s tale, and that the psychoanalyst is relating these events already once removed. It’s a fitting caveat lector, but it also provides a character justification for the surreal and shadowy mood of this section, the story coming not from an objective analytical observer (Mrs Bradley) but instead from a subjective author of fiction (David Harben).

Erin Cordell reports that she “tended to get a little lost” during the presentations of past and present – one of the challenges of this book even for seasoned GM readers – but that “some of the passages were really intriguing.” Lynn MacGrath observes, “The main point about these chapters is the tension (no wonder I read so quickly last time!) especially in the scene where Harben is attacked while swimming. There are also pathos, humour and insight; pretty impressive for a thorough-going adventure story.”

THE WAR AND THE WRITER

Researcher and scholar Chris B. has once more provided fascinating historical and geographical details for the group, and I find myself wanting to share all of his information because the context is so enjoyable. A sincere thank you for offering these insights, Chris. First up, some acronym education.

Chris writes that “the ARP abbreviation used by Stephen Woods in Chapter 12 stands for Air Raid Precautions, the general name for the civil-defence operation, comprising thousands of volunteer Wardens, that supervised response to air raids: sounding alarm sirens, organising evacuations, enforcing blackout, issuing gas-masks, guarding bombed buildings.” By the way, ARP manuevers, and a body discovered in an ARP reserve water tank by fun-seeking boys, kicks off Mitchell’s earlier high-spirited, war-set mystery, 1940’s Brazen Tongue. You can spot the initials on the headlines of the original UK dustjacket, behind a suitably reptilian Mrs Bradley.

Chris explains that in Sunset over Soho, “Stephen seems to be working on what he calls ARP firefloats – i.e. floating fire-engines, a long-standing resource of the London Fire Brigade on the Thames, and much needed in the Blitz because the London Docks were a prime target of the Luftwaffe. In this case, though, he would have joined the Auxiliary Fire Service rather than the ARP.”

Chris also gave careful consideration to Lynn Walker’s question in the previous post. She wondered whether Gladys Mitchell might have visited London during the Blitz and experienced an air raid, as the author wrote so vividly and knowledgeably about this moment in time. Here is his reply.
“We don’t have her direct testimony, and there’s a career-break gap in her CV for 1939 to 1941, attributed to unidentified ill-health. It’s conceivable that she left for some rural location (an Oxfordshire pig-farm, maybe?) along with other evacuees; but if we assume she was still living in Brentford, where she would resume teaching in 1941, she would, without needing to visit central London, have experienced multiple air raids, although not as heavy as those suffered by the East End.”

Chris continues: “Her home town, although legally distinct, was in effect a western riverside suburb of London, regularly visited by German bomber crews following the Thames in search of secondary targets; the entire riverside of Brentford, easily identifiable as an industrial zone from its Gasworks to its own Dock, was such a target. A total of 90 bombs landed on Brentford during the Blitz, one of them hitting a corner of the Gasworks, another the football stadium. The high school that Gladys had as a girl attended in nearby Isleworth was also hit. (The locations are all now mapped on the website Bomb Sight: Mapping the WW2 Bomb Census.) Gladys was not to know this when she wrote Sunset, but the first of the German V2 rockets to strike London in September 1944 would, quite by chance, land on a row of houses in Chiswick, about a mile east of the novel’s mystery house.”

Chris adds persuasively that “the carefully detailed description of the Rest Centre in the opening chapters also suggests strongly that she did personally visit the real Baptist Church shelter in St Giles with notebook in hand, although presumably by daylight when it was safer to do so. This further suggests that she was not evacuated to a pig-farm during the Blitz, nor visiting the Canary Islands, but was still somewhere closer to central London, most likely at Brentford.”

THE NUNS AND THE ORPHANS

Joyka describes the memorable introduction of some new characters in the cast this way: “A procession of boys and led by nuns marches back and forth in front of Harben’s tub, and any reader of GM knows this cannot be ignored!” In this moment, Joyka reports, “we learn that war has been declared, the orphans have been evacuated, and no one wants to take in inner city orphans. David Harben offers his boat and then his help to find housing, which leads him to a black-haired, skinny woman with a beaky mouth and a crocodile grin who is a very generous hostess. And, not inconsequentially, the very person David needs as a confidante.”

Tracy found this “a lovely sequence where David Harben discusses religion, faith and belief with the younger of the nuns.” It is indeed a nicely drawn scene, and serves to humanize both Harben and Sister Mary Dominic as they form a bond through conversation and theological debate.
Erin wrote that “Harben's discussion of God with the nun intrigued me… Murder mysteries don't often go into belief of a deity.” She asks whether “the author had religious conflicts or was she a devoted believer sneaking in a plug for religion?”

It is my view that Gladys Mitchell was a student of life, interested in exploring all the perspectives and paradoxes that humanity offered. Her books show that she is comfortable presenting characters with convincingly firm Christian religious beliefs – her beloved sister took the orders to become a Dominican nun – but she is also fascinated by pagan and occult rituals. In Soho as with so many other GM titles, there is also an ancient respect of Nature and the elements that provide a religion for the community. 1935’s The Devil at Saxon Wall is a shining example of this, and her Stephen Hockaby stories like Marsh Hay (1933) and Gabriel’s Hold (1935) also find characters interacting with a fickle Nature that can alternately bless and destroy with its power.

As for the orphans, they are not delineated as characters through the same attention the author gives the nuns who oversee them. However, their presence provides energy and a reminder that the war and displacement affects youth and adults alike. Lynn M. comments that “as usual, Mitchell writes wonderful children. The exchange between Harben and the orphans is so convincing; as in real life, the children see more than adults give them credit for!” Young people – and their attendant energy and wisdom – become colorful confidants to the elderly detective in several Mrs Bradley stories.

THE RIVER AND THE SIREN

From Tracy: “Some of the descriptions in these chapters are just wonderful. The river and its surroundings were brought alive for me in this book.” She singled out a few passages that were especially effective, including this one from Chapter Eleven:

The wide, shallow steps from the garden went down to the bed of the river. Almost beside them, less than three yards to the left, a cut had been made in the bank and a very small boathouse built. Just as he came to this boathouse the sun came bright, and the mist began to roll off the face of the garden and, hanging about the trees for a minute or two, was swept away on a breeze.

As David Harben spends much of his time in the river, navigating it with his tub, stripping and swimming the cold waters to the river bank, and even dodging a deadly attack by two men in a boat, Gladys Mitchell uses her impressive skills as a writer to evoke a tactile landscape constantly in flux between its churning currents and its swirling mists. Like the eerie house at twilight, it is another ethereal setpiece in Sunset over Soho designed to occupy a space between dreaming and reality, between fact and fiction. Even the sunset found in the title recalls an event transitioning between two states of being.

To orient us better, Chris has useful information about the specific geography. He writes that “the small riverside town of Helsey Marsh, where David meets the nuns and then Mrs Bradley in Chapter 8, is fictional. It appears to be somewhere not far from Windsor. The location of the mystery Chiswick house becomes clearer in Chapter 12, as David finds himself ‘between the bridge and the first of the riverside houses’: he is on Strand-on-the-Green, the riverside road just to the east of Kew Bridge, where the Chiswick almshouses, first mentioned in Chapter 4, are still to be found.”

The Bell and Crown today, riverside view.

Chris continues, “The ‘inn’ he visits is almost certainly The Bell and Crown (est. 1751), the first of three pubs east of the bridge. Looming over the western side of the bridge are the Brentford Gasworks (for which Gladys Mitchell’s father had once worked). Until they were demolished in 1965, they were a notoriously ugly landmark dominating both the riverbank and the main road entrance into Brentford.”

David Harben’s elusive mermaid-like love interest remains unknowable in these chapters, and this aspect of the story is the one Joyka finds least satisfying. She explains that, for her, “this book has none of the depth of characterization that I like in other Mrs Bradley novels. Harben seems trite and unexceptional. Leda is unemotional and juvenile. I think Inspector Pirberry agrees with me.” She writes that these characters are uninteresting and fare poorly when compared to some Mrs B adventures where the players are drawn with more life. Joyka references the same year’s The Worsted Viper as a contrast: “In Viper, the menace of those characters jumped off the page.” With Soho, the story takes on a “surreal” quality, and she thinks that might also contribute to her lack of engagement here.

Final thoughts from the group: Tracy reports that “so far, I am enjoying the story and the writing immensely. Of the three Mrs Bradley books I have read, this is my favorite.” Erin enjoys Inspector Pirberry – she calls out his feeling like “a squirrel in a cage” while exploring the riverside house – and notes that by the end of this section “Mrs Bradley is more clever that he is… always.” Lynn M. adds, “It’s been such a pleasure re-reading this story (more carefully this time!).”

And one last fun fact from Chris: “While examining maggots in the mystery house in Chapter 10, Mrs Bradley suddenly mentions ‘The Yellow Slugs... You must have read it.’ She refers to a short story by [fellow crime fiction writer] H. C. Bailey, “The Yellow Slugs” (Windsor Magazine, March 1935; reprinted in Bailey’s collection Mr Fortune Objects, 1935).

Next week we discuss Chapters 13 to 18 of Sunset over Soho! Thank you to everyone who is contributing or reading along with us.

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Book Review: DEATH IN THE GRAND MANOR (1970) by Anne Morice

4/13/2021

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Dean Street Press, the modest but mighty publisher that is tirelessly returning to print the titles of so many worthy but overlooked mystery fiction writers, has added another enjoyable series of books to its catalog. This time new readers can sample the light-hearted puzzle stories of Anne Morice, who began her adventures featuring actress Tessa Crichton with 1970’s Death in the Grand Manor. Over the next two decades, Morice – the pen name of British author Felicity Shaw – would add nearly two dozen more entries to the series, writing up until her death in 1989.

There is much to enjoy with Grand Manor, especially if one is in the mood for a post-Golden Age cosy mystery with a fair amount of winking wit to illuminate dialogue and characterization. The author’s protagonist, Tessa, narrates this tale with an energetic efficiency and a sense of humor that keep the story moving along. This is one of those worlds where you may envy the characters their underemployed lifestyles: villagers have ample time to walk the grounds, consider the gardens, visit the pub, and gossip with the neighbors while not actually holding a job or earning a recognizable income. Tessa herself is content to wait for her agent to call her with an acting offer, and in the meantime spends her days with her cousin Toby, an indolent playwright, at his home on Roakes Common.

The plot is a simple one. Tessa relates the incidents that, individually and collectively, have turned the residents of Roakes Common against the Manor House inhabitants. Short-tempered Douglas Cornford and his mentally unstable wife Bronwen have staged multiple assaults on the community property, including the placement of barbed wire that caused the death of a dog and the construction of a building of that would ruin the view for others. When Bronwen’s body is found in a ravine (right at the book’s midway point), Tessa decides to investigate. She finds her motivation for the role of sleuth not so much out of sympathy for the Cornfords but more from a romantic attraction to blond, young Robin Price, the cheerful Scotland Yard Inspector assigned to the case.

As mentioned, the comic tone and breezy wit of Tessa’s narration are the most notable elements of Death in the Grand Manor, and the book feels like a kindred spirit to Simon Brett’s sprightly Charles Paris tales of theatre-set murder and mayhem. Anne Morice also demonstrates a facility for generating clues, especially of the misleading kind. There are many red herrings in Grand Manor, and I followed two of them quite willingly before learning, at the conclusion, that they were indeed false trails. Here is a sample of Tessa’s (and Morice’s) storytelling style, and this agreeable attitude is to be found on every page:

“I shan’t take up much of your time,” Sergeant Baines said, when he had been introduced to Toby and waded through all the preliminary civilities. “I was wondering whether you had been the recipient of anything in the nature of an anonymous letter?”

I quite expected Toby to ask how anything could be in the nature of an anonymous letter without being an anonymous letter, but I saw from the blank and innocent look which he immediately assumed that the question had jolted him beyond the point of pedantry.

A few online reviewers have mentioned that, for all the details of Tessa Crichton’s life and subjective musings, the character remains oddly, paradoxically weightless. I tend to agree with them, and think it might be due to the author not really giving Tessa a range of emotions to play. She is always flippant and acerbic, so why should we worry too much about whether or not she will succeed as an actress or fall in love with the policeman? It’s similar to when a person uses continuous irony and indifference as emotional armor, which doesn’t allow or invite others to empathize.

Along these lines, the most jarring note for me in the whole book comes at the dénouement, when two families with children have suffered a tragic impact (including Tessa’s niece) from the murder and its aftermath, and no reference is made (even in passing) about the new, sobering reality for the affected family members. Murder mysteries do not have to pulsate with capital-T Tragedy – they can be lighter entertainment, as Anne Morice surely intended here – but ignoring completely the consequences brought on by an identified and apprehended killer gives the reader one more excuse to dismiss the story as mere disposable fantasy.

Reviewers (including Curtis Evans, who wrote the introduction and author biography for this reprinted edition) mention that the Tessa Crichton mysteries change somewhat after this premiere title, and I am curious to see what the next book, 1971’s Murder in Married Life, might bring. The first ten books in Anne Morice’s series are available from Dean Street Press, with the rest of the series hopefully to follow.

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Book Review: MALICE IN WONDERLAND (1940) by Nicholas Blake

Mitchell Mystery Reading Group: SUNSET OVER SOHO (1943) - Post #3

Mitchell Mystery Reading Group: SUNSET OVER SOHO (1943) - Post #2

Book Review: DEATH IN THE GRAND MANOR (1970) by Anne Morice

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