Tag: Golden Age mysteries

Review 2615: The Widow of Bath

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Hugh Everton is traveling around English seaside towns reviewing hotels and restaurants for a travel company when he meets an old flame, Lucy Bath, the glamorous wife of a judge. Hugh is immediately afraid, but we don’t understand why until later. Lucy is with an entourage, and when they all decide to return to her home, she invites Hugh, and he goes.

One of the men Hugh thinks he recognizes as a guy named Ronson, but Ronson is introduced as Atkinson. The judge, who has been looking for his missing dog, takes Hugh aside and seems to be intending to confide in him but changes his mind. He goes up early to bed.

The others are playing cards when they hear a shot, followed by a yelp from a dog. Lucy goes upstairs to investigate. When she doesn’t immediately return, Atkinson goes up, accompanied by Hugh. They find the judge dead with a hole in his head and no gun to be found.

When they try to call the police, the phone is dead, so Atkinson drives off to the police station. Hugh goes out to look for the dog and nearly catches a woman in the garden. He finds the dog with a broken leg. Soon Inspector Leigh arrives, but the body is gone.

Everton has found the entire evening to have a menacing undercurrent. However, he has had bad experiences with the police, so he is not as forthright as he could have been.

I hadn’t heard of Margot Bennett before reading Someone from the Past, but I think she has been seriously underrated to have almost disappeared from our knowledge. This novel has an interesting noirish plot with strong characterization and witty dialogue. Bennett moved away from crime fiction to writing for television after writing only a few books. I think that’s a shame.

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Review 2590: The Night of Fear

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At a Christmas house party with the staff dismissed to attend a party in the village, the guests play a game of hide and seek. The host, George Tunbridge, and Julian Haviland, a young guest, wait for 20 minutes after the lights have been turned off at the main and then are supposed to look for those in hiding. However, before they begin to do that, another guest, a blind man named Hugh Darrow, comes running out in a panic. He has discovered the bloody body of another guest, the famous writer Edgar Stallard.

Sergeant Lane has Inspector Collier of Scotland Yard staying with him as a guest, and he is happy to bring him along on the case. Suicide being ruled out because of the absence of a weapon, and no forced entry discovered, the police feel the murderer must be one of the guests.

Aside from George Tunbridge and his wife, who is so shaken she takes immediately to her bed, the guests are Sir Eustace Tunbridge, a pompous older man engaged to a beautiful young Diana Storey; Mrs. Storey, Diana’s grandmother, who went to bed early; Ruth Clare, a young woman who it becomes clear is in love with Hugh Darrow; and a bunch of young people, including Angela Haviland, who were hiding together and are so alibied. Even George and Julian are without an alibi, as they stood on either side of a screen as they waited.

Unfortunately, the Chief Constable is offended to find Collier on the scene, and he is asked to report back to London. That leaves Sergeant Lane to investigate by himself for a day. The next morning, he is found unconscious from a gas leak in his room. Collier is convinced that he was on to something, but his notes have been ripped from his notebook. Collier’s replacement, Inspector Purley, arrives and comes down heavily on everyone then concludes that the murderer was Hugh Darrow, who had a grudge against Stallard and didn’t tell anyone that his blindness was cured from the shock of discovering the body. In making this decision, Purley is ignoring some clues—that despite typing at all hours, Stallard appears to have left no notes or manuscript in his room and that Sergeant Lane is poisoned in the hospital after Darrow is arrested.

To help with the defense, Collier recommends a private investigator, Mr. Glide. When Sergeant Lane is poisoned, he is unable to speak but writes a clue on a piece of paper.

This novel wasn’t quite as zippy as Dalton’s first one and had a little too much recap of the evidence, but it was still fun to read and fairly baffling. It looks to me as though Mr. Glide might become a recurring character. I’m looking forward to the next one.

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2577: The Unfinished Clue

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Georgette Heyer can write such likable characters, and I remember that for the first Heyer mystery I read, it was obvious who the murderer was because the person was the only character in the book, besides the victim, that I didn’t like. It didn’t matter, because it was fun to read anyway.

She isn’t so obvious about it in The Unfinished Clue, because there are several characters to dislike or feel neutral about. In fact, the title is more of a giveaway than the characters’ behavior, because it tells you what to focus on. If you can guess what it means, though, you get a gold star.

Dinah Fawcett arrives at her sister’s house to be met with an enraged brother-in-law. General Arthur Billington-Smith is often enraged, and he takes it out on his fragile second wife, Fay. This time, his son, Geoffrey, has become engaged and is bringing home his fiancée Lola de Silva, a cabaret dancer.

The house party consists of these people plus Arthur’s nephew, Captain Francis Billington-Smith, who wants a loan; Camilla Halliday, an attractive young woman who is letting Arthur take liberties in the hope of a generous gift; her jealous husband Basil; and Stephen Guest, a friend who is in love with Fay. Geoffrey turns out to be kind of a wimp and an idiot, and Lola completely self-absorbed.

Arthur rages throughout the weekend, which culminates in a stormy Monday morning. He tells Geoffrey he will cut him off if he marries Lola. Geoffrey goes to Lola vowing eternal love, and she tells him of course she can’t marry him if he doesn’t have any money. He storms off. Fay is lying down from a headache. There is a short visit by Mrs. Chudleigh, the vicar’s wife. Then Mrs. Twinings arrives, an old friend, to try to get Arthur to treat Geoffrey better, and she finds Arthur dead in his office, stabbed in the neck with a dagger from his desk. The crime boils down to where everyone was between 12:30 and 1. Only Dinah, who was on the terrace the whole time, has an alibi.

In most of Heyer’s mysteries, her detective team is Hannasyde and Hemingway, but in this novel the detective is Inspector Hardy. She hasn’t thought up Hannasyde and Heminway yet, I don’t think, but there’s another good reason why this book is different.

I was completely fooled by this mystery. I had some idea of the motive but was mistaken about the identity of the killer.

Georgette Heyer is just as gifted as Christie in creating vivid characters, and her mysteries tend to be a bit funny. In this case, Lola is a hoot. I had lots of fun reading this to take a break from A Century of Books.

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Review 2569: #1952Club! Mrs. McGinty’s Dead

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It’s time for the 1952 Club, for which participants review books written in 1952 on the same week. What would a year club set between the 1930s and the 1960s be without an Agatha Christie? So, this book became one of my choices for the 1952 Club, especially good because I hadn’t read it before.

However, first, as usual, I have a list of the books I’ve reviewed previously that were written in 1952:

And now for my review.

Hercule Poirot is retired, and the days are passing slowly. So, he is happy to look into a case for an old acquaintance, Inspector Spence. An old cleaning lady was apparently murdered for her savings by her lodger. All the evidence points that way, and the lodger was found guilty. But Inspector Spence isn’t satisfied that he did it, and there is little time to investigate before he is hung.

So, Poirot journeys to a small village—only four houses and a post office. He meets a few people and seems to be getting nowhere when a chance remark gives him an idea. Mrs. McGinty had purchased ink at the post office, which meant she intended to write a letter, and she was so unaccustomed to writing letters that she had no ink. Who was she writing to?

Going back to look through some of her things, he finds a newspaper with an article ripped out. When he finds the paper at the archive, he sees the article is a “Where are they now?” piece about females connected with four infamous crimes, with old photos from 20 years before. He reckons that Mrs. McGinty, in her work as a cleaner, saw one of those photos at the home of a regular client. Someone in the village has a relationship with one of those women, but what kind of relationship? The field broadens as he considers. Is it the woman herself? A relative or spouse? With the range in age of the original females, the woman could now be anywhere from her 30s to her 50s.

And that was the problem. There are too many people in this book, many of them suspects, and Christie didn’t do her usual job of making them instantly specific. I couldn’t keep track of them by their names. The only distinctive villager at first is Maureen Summerhayes, Poirot’s incompetent hostess, who can’t cook and is completely disorganized, but I soon thought of her as Maureen, so that by the time there was a reference to Mr. Summerhayes, I had forgotten he was Maureen’s husband.

Fairly early on, Poirot meets his old friend the author, Ariadne Oliver. She is staying with the playwright Robin Upward while they try to adapt one of her books for the theater. Mrs. Upward is another of Mrs. McGinty’s clients, and thus a suspect.

I never thought of the murderer as a suspect, but I also felt I wasn’t given much of a reason to. I just didn’t think this was one of Christie’s best.

I was also struck by how little any of Mrs. McGinty’s clients cared that she was dead. There’s some real classism going on here (including the idea that she had to buy ink because she never wrote any letters; even if it happened to be true; anyone might have to buy ink).

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Review 2563: One by One They Disappeared

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Inspector Collier meets a wealthy American in the lobby of a hotel one evening and begins chatting with him. He is Mr. Pakenham, and he explains that he was a survivor during the war of the sinking of the Coptic. He and eight other men were afloat on a lifeboat for days, and he being ill, the others kept him alive. Ever since then, the men have met once a year to celebrate their survival, and last year, Mr. Pakenham announced that he was leaving his estate to whomever of the group survived him. This year, however, only a couple of men showed up.

In the meantime, Corinna Lacy returns from Europe where she has been working as a companion. She is not well off, but she has a few assets, so she writes her second cousin, who is also her trustee, to ask his advice about selling her property to pay for a secretarial course. She has never met Wilfred Stark, but he invites her to his place to talk about it and turns out to be a friendly, fatherly sort of person. While she is there, she meets his neighbor, Gilbert Freyne, who has a shadow on his past.

Investigating an apparent accident in which a blind man walked into an empty elevator shaft, Inspector Collier recognizes Henry Raymond, a man who was meeting Mr. Pakenham the night of the dinner as one of the prospective heirs. Inspector Collier begins looking into the other heirs. He can’t find some of them, but several of them have died recently, and one of the heirs is Gilbert Freyne, with whom Corinna is falling in love.

Yes, it’s a plot! We find out part of it as early as page 60, but the rest is not clear until the end. I had my suspicions pretty early, though, and they were right. But that didn’t make the book any less fun to read.

True to its 1929 origins, there isn’t a lot of characterization going on here, and Corinna is eventually so much the heroine in peril that she might as well be tied to a railroad track. But there is a bit more of an emphasis on character development than in most mysteries of this time, and at least it’s not a puzzle mystery. It’s more of a mystery/adventure story.

Will innocent lives by saved? Including Mr. Pakenham? Will the murderer or murderers be brought to justice? Has Corinna fallen in love with a villain or victim? And what about Mr. Pakenham’s cat?

I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2529: Sparkling Cyanide

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This novel begins in an unusual way for Christie, with sections on six people, each of whom had a motive to kill Rosemary Barton. There’s her younger sister, Iris Marie, who would inherit a fortune. There’s her husband George’s secretary, Ruth Lansing, who would like to take her place. There’s Anthony Browne, whose secret Rosemary has discovered, that he is really Tony Morelli. There’s Stephen Faraday, whose career as a policeman will be finished if his wife learns of his affair with Rosemary. There’s Sandra Faraday, who already knows about the affair. Finally, there’s her husband, George Barton, who also knows about the affair. Almost a year ago, these six were together at a party when Rosemary suddenly died from cyanide poisoning.

Rosemary’s death was ruled a suicide. Now, nearly a year later, someone has mailed George letters saying that Rosemary was murdered, so George decides to set a trap by reconvening the same people at the same table. But first, he asks in his friend, Colonel Race. Race things it’s a foolish idea, and it is—for George dies that night, also poisoned.

Colonel Race teams up with Inspector Kemp to try to figure out what happened. Was Rosemary poisoned? Who wrote the letters? How could anyone have poisoned George without touching his drink?

I don’t think the approach used in this novel was very successful. The writing seemed oddly static. It is only when we leave the character bios that the novel snaps back to life, with Christie’s usual clever dialogue and interesting action. Then, it’s quite good and makes you forget the first part.

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Review 2519: Murder after Christmas

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There’s nothing like a nice, cozy mystery to read at Christmas time. This one is so cozy, in fact, that you don’t want any of the characters to be murderers. And what better day to post the review of a book called Murder after Christmas than New Year’s Eve?

When Rhoda Redpath invites her eccentric, elderly, very wealthy stepfather to spend Christmas, none of the Redpaths expect him to come. After all, he has never come before. Uncle Willie is nearly 90 and has lived a rambunctious life, so there are lots of people who want to meet him. Thus, when he agrees to come, the Redpaths decide to throw a real blowout, a Christmas Tree on Boxing Day, and invite everyone.

Once he arrives, his behavior is a bit odd. He eats a lot, stuffing down loads of mince pies and chocolates even though it is wartime. He gets the order of his wives mixed up, and all the Christmas packages disappear. He also starts writing his memoirs, so they have to hire a secretary.

During the party, he is hardly to be seen except when he appears dressed as Santa to pass out the packages. Frank Redpath, the host, also appears as Santa, but having been upstaged by Uncle Willie, his appearance is a bust. Then the next morning, Uncle Willie is found frozen stiff out by the snowman, still in his Santa suit. Was it a natural death or did someone murder him? When everyone learns that his wife died on Christmas day, the timing becomes very important.

Uncle Willie is found to have laudanum in his system. Nevertheless, the coroner’s hearing finds the cause of death accidental, assuming the batty old man took an overdose. Inspector Culley isn’t quite sure, so when Frank and Rhoda Redpath ask him to stay and figure out what really happened, he agrees.

Inspector Culley’s clue collection involves lots of mince pies—sewn into a chair cushion, eaten before Christmas, eaten after Christmas, packages hung from the ceiling, chocolates hidden in the snowman, and a turkey in the wardrobe—among other things. The whole thing is ridiculous and hard to keep track of, so I just went along for the ride.

Lots of fun, this one. I’ll never look at mince pies the same again.

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Review 2517: Dead Ernest

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I very much enjoyed the Tilton books I have read so far, especially for a certain wacky energy, so when I saw that Dead Ernest filled a hole in my Century of Books project, I looked for a copy. At first, this novel was almost too frenetic for me, but either it calmed down a bit or I got used to it.

Leonidas Witherall, Tilton’s amateur sleuth, is trying to finish one of his Lieutenant Haseltine adventure novels before his publisher goes crazy, so he has asked not to be disturbed. However, telegrams keep arriving that he doesn’t look at, people keep coming to the door, and his housekeeper, Mrs. Mullet, keeps trying to tell him things he refuses to listen to. Of course, we know he should at least be opening the telegrams and listening to Mrs. Mullet.

After Leonidas sends her home, two young men show up with a truck and try to deliver a freezer. Leonidas thinks they have the wrong address and sends them next door where new neighbors are moving in. The two men come back and say the neighbors don’t want it either, but Leonidas sends them away again after they tell him that a man fixing a tire beside the road paid them to deliver it. Later, he finds the freezer shoved into his kitchen. Inside is a leg of lamb, some haddock, and a body. Leonidas is horrified to recognize it.

Leonidas recently picked up some new offices and duties. One of them involves Meredith Academy, which was taken over by the Navy during the war. Now that the war is over, the Navy has handed it back without warning. This would normally not affect Leonidas, but he was willed the school by a friend and has decided to act as head at least for the meantime. He recognizes the body as that of Ernest Finger, whom he hired as French instructor the day before.

As soon as he discovers the body, the doorbell rings. It’s a girl dressed in violet who says she was sent for his birthday. And she is determined to stay for the time she was hired even when he tells her it is not his birthday. People keep coming over, and it’s all he can do to keep his nosy neighbor, Mrs. Havershaw, from opening the freezer. Once he gets rid of all of them except Terry, the girl, he tells her what’s going on and they decide to join forces.

As Leonidas keeps getting pulled into social engagements he’s forgotten about, he continues to investigate, ruling suspects out and gaining and losing partners as he goes. This novel is funny and entertaining, and the case is ridiculous. The perfect light reading.

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Review 2485: #RIPXIX! The Listening House

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This old mystery, written in 1938, is a doozy. And, it qualifies for RIP XIX!

After losing her job through no fault of her own, Gwynne Dacres decides she has to move out of her apartment. She takes a couple of rooms in a rooming house owned by Mrs. Garr. Although the house is dreary, the rooms are spacious and nice—and available at a cheap rent.

Once she moves in, she is taken aback by Mrs. Garr’s behavior, popping in every time she moves furniture, and also her stinginess about hot water. But worse, at night she feels as if the house is listening for something.

Her rooms are on the ground floor with a door to the back overlooking a steep hill. One morning she goes outside and sees a dead body lying on the ground below the property. He is identified as Mr. Zeitman, a local gangster. The conclusion is that the area behind the house made an easy dumping ground.

Things keep happening, though. Gwynne sees a stranger dart down the stairs. She hears footsteps at night. Someone breaks in and is clearly looking for something.

Then Mrs. Garr goes on an outing to Chicago with her niece and doesn’t return. When her niece comes over, the residents find she may never have gone. She is finally found dead inside the kitchen that she always keeps locked.

Gwynne has gotten acquainted with another lodger, Mr. Hodge Kistler, who owns a local newspaper, and together they begin talking over the string of events. When Lieutenant Strom comes into the investigation, he begins to involve Gwynne because she keeps discovering things that his men have missed.

Then one night someone knocks Gwynne over the head.

Gwynne is 1930s smart and sassy. The story is fast-moving and it’s hard to know what’s going on. Once the investigation gets going, Mrs. Garr is connected to a horrible crime from years before, and connections begin to be made with some of the lodgers. This is quite a fun book, deeply entertaining.

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Review 2451: Endless Night

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Mike Rogers is a wanderer who moves from job to job, never seeming to amount to much. But he has a taste for finer things. One thing he wants is to have an architect he’s met build a house at Gipsys’s Acres, but even though the property is going cheap because of the curse on it, he can’t afford it.

He goes up to look at the property one day and meets Ellie Guteman. She is a young, wealthy heiress who has slipped her leash from trustees who keep her so protected that she never has any fun. With the help of her companion, Greta, she contiues to see Mike, and they daydream about buying Gipsy’s Acres and building their dream house. Eventually, they decide to get married on the day she turns 21. (Here’s some book serendipity, a concept coined by Bookish Beck, two books within a week that have houses being built that may turn out to be haunted. The other is The House Next Door.)

All goes well until they move into Gipsy’s Acres. Ellie keeps meeting Mrs. Lee, an old gypsy woman who warns her of danger. Someone throws a stone through the window. Even though Ellie’s relatives are American, they show up for visits, and they are not very nice. And Ellie has offered Greta a place to live. Lots of people seem not to like Greta, including Mike.

The novel is narrated by Mike, who seems disarmingly straightforward. However, there is a lot going on under the surface, and Mike is an unreliable narrator.

Although I guessed what was going on fairly early, that didn’t ruin my appreciation of how Christie slowly builds suspense. Then, at the very end, the novel took a turn I didn’t expect. Note that gypsies don’t fare well in the comments of characters.

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