St Peter’s Finger by Gladys Mitchell

Detailed detective work restores order to convent

St Peter's Finger is the ninth of
Mitchell's Mrs Bradley stories

Mrs Bradley shows no fear while staying in a sinister convent school in a remote spot on top of some cliffs, even though attempts are made on her life while she is there.

Gladys Mitchell often describes her sleuth as a ‘little old lady’, but Mrs Bradley is still very active and prepared to climb out of a window on to a roof, carry a child’s body up a flight of stairs as an experiment, and sleep in various rooms in the convent, even though she is quite sure there is a murderer among the religious community.

While describing the daily life of nuns living in the convent, as well as Mrs Bradley’s painstaking investigation into the death of a boarder at the school, Gladys Mitchell still manages to keep the reader engaged with the story because of the skill of her writing.

She evokes the atmosphere of the isolated institution and brings alive the personalities of the various black-robed nuns who serve there, keeping the reader turning the pages. No doubt drawing on her own experience as a teacher, she brings to life the routine of the school and creates believable characters among the pupils.

St Peter’s Finger, written in 1938, is Gladys Mitchell’s ninth novel featuring the psychoanalyst and amateur detective Mrs Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley.

Called on by her barrister son, Ferdinand Lestrange to investigate the death of a child at the convent, who is the heiress to a fortune, Mrs Bradley, as a favour to him, willingly enters the convent herself and lives like one of the nuns. However, she also has her faithful chauffeur George, residing nearby, ready to take her out for the occasional sustaining meal and to make enquiries further afield. He also helps out with the investigation.

While Mrs Bradley tests alibis, interviews suspects and witnesses, and holds long debates with the nuns,  Gladys Mitchell cleverly points the reader in several different directions until  the novel reaches an ingenious and satisfying ending.

Buy St Peter's Finger from Amazon

Home

Death at the Bar by Ngaio Marsh

Classic mystery has an atmospheric setting

Marsh's Death at the Bar
- a pleasure to read

Rereading Death at the Bar has reminded me of the high quality of Ngaio Marsh’s writing. It is not just that the characters are intriguing and the plot keeps you guessing, it is also that the book is a pleasure to read.

The gentlemanly Detective Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn has travelled to Devon with his subordinate officer, Detective Inspector Fox, to investigate the death of a well-known barrister, Luke Watchman, who has been staying at a village pub in Devon for a holiday with his cousin and a friend.

The post mortem analysis has shown the presence of some kind of cyanide in Watchman’s blood and so the local police have called in Scotland Yard to help them.

Alleyn and Fox are glad to get away from the summer heat in London and they go to stay at the traditional Devonshire inn, The Plume of Feathers, while they conduct their investigation. Marsh presents the reader with a beautifully described setting, some interesting characters and a complex investigation, that keeps you turning the pages until she finally reveals the truth.

The death occurs during a game of darts in one of the bars at the pub and it is not clear whether the cyanide was on one of the darts or in a glass of brandy. The lights went out because of a storm that evening and the floor ended up covered with broken glass that had been trodden on by the people in the bar.

Patrick Malahide played the part of Roderick
Alleyn in the 1990s BBC TV adaptation

Thorough detective work, including weighing the fragments of glass, help Alleyn to arrive at the truth about what has happened.

Death at the Bar, the ninth book in the Roderick Alleyn series by Ngaio Marsh, was published by Collins in 1940. It was written in the spring of 1939 before the start of World War II. Contemporary reviews were all positive about the novel and many of the reviewers praised the plot and characters and said they had enjoyed the humour.

Marsh had been on a long visit to England in 1937 and 1938 and had visited Devon and Cornwall. She was drawing on her memories of staying in Polperro when she created the fictional village of Ottercombe, which is the setting for the novel.

Buy Death at the Bar from Amazon

Home

The Case of the Late Pig by Margery Allingham

Murky goings on in an idyllic village

The Case of the Late Pig is a
short but entertaining novel

I found this to be a very enjoyable story, told in the first person by Albert Campion himself, rather than by the author narrating the events as in the other Campion novels.

It is an intriguing plot, which keeps the reader guessing throughout the book, with Campion’s butler, valet and bodyguard, Magersfontein Lugg, playing a big part.

Campion receives a strange message summoning him to the funeral of a former schoolmate, Pig Peters, who he remembers only as an unpleasant bully.

The funeral is a peculiar affair, but afterwards Campion puts all thoughts of Pig Peters behind him.

But when he is called in later, by old friends in rural Suffolk, to investigate a strange death in their village, he is amazed to find that the victim is Peters, who, it appears, has just been killed again, five months after Campion had attended his funeral.

When the body immediately disappears from the police station where it is being kept, Campion sets out to investigate some very odd goings on, helped by his protective, if unconventional, manservant Lugg.

He sees that other people who had attended the original funeral have also turned up in the village and the plot becomes even more murky.

Allingham chose to tell this
Campion story in the first person

First published in 1937 by Hodder and Stoughton, the same year as Allingham’s Campion novel, Dancers in Mourning, The Case of the Late Pig, is a slim book, just 138 pages long in my copy, a Penguin Classic Crime edition.  It also appeared as a short story, in Albert Campion Criminologist, a collection of stories published by Margery Allingham in the same year.

It is the only Campion adventure to be told in the first person by the gentleman sleuth himself, who was initially thought to be a parody of Dorothy L Sayers's hero detective Lord Peter Wimsey,

However, Campion matured into a strong, individual character, who was part-detective and part-adventurer, and he formed the basis for 18 novels and many short stories by Margery Allingham.

I particularly liked The Case of the Late Pig because it was entertaining as well as a whodunit. Although the character of Campion is rooted in the tradition of aristocratic detectives, his behaviour during the novel, and that of his unconventional manservant, give the story a unique feel, and the plot is full of surprises.

Buy The Case of the Late Pig from Amazon.

The Key - A Miss Silver Mystery by Patricia Wentworth

Beautifully written detective story evokes another era

The Key was Wentworth's
eighth Miss Silver mystery

This Miss Silver novel is set in England during World War II, at a time when people living in rural communities would have been well aware that seemingly ordinary people in their midst could be Nazi sympathisers.

A Jewish scientist has fled Germany after losing his wife and daughter and is lodging in a house in a small village, while working to complete a new weapon that he has invented, which will help the British Government.

When the scientist, Michael Harsch, is found dead in the local church, apparently from shooting himself on the eve of handing over his formula, the Government send Major Garth Albany to investigate because his Aunt Sophy lives in the same village and so he has some local knowledge.

Aunt Sophy lives close to the house where the dead scientist, Michael Harsch had been staying. He had been looked after by a young, woman, Janice Meade, who had become a good friend to him.

Garth and Janice had been friends while growing up in the village together, and Patricia Wentworth allows this friendship to blossom into romance during the novel, when the couple eventually join forces to investigate Harsch’s death.

A romance during a murder investigation is one of Patricia Wentworth’s trademarks, setting her apart from other detective novelists of the time, but it does nothing to hinder the plot.

There is no shortage of potential Nazi sympathisers living in the village. Bush, the verger at the church is of German descent and Miss Brown, a mysterious woman who has suddenly become Aunt Sophy’s companion, also arouses Garth’s suspicions.

Wentworth's novels often
featured a romance

The Key, first published in 1946, is Patricia Wentworth’s eighth novel featuring Miss Maud Silver, a retired governess with a fondness for Tennyson, who finds it easy to blend into her surroundings and get people to talk to her. She works closely with Scotland Yard, who respect her ability, and derive benefit from the information she is able to draw out of people in conversation that would otherwise have been unavailable to them.

Miss Silver appears about halfway through the novel, after being called in by Aunt Sophy and Garth, based on her reputation for solving mysteries, when they think the wrong person has been arrested by the police for the killing. They had heard about her from a cousin of Aunt Sophy, who had previously benefited from Miss Silver’s talent for investigation.

Although the novel was written more than 80 years ago, it is engaging and very readable. The period in which it is set is beautifully evoked and the characters are well portrayed. Patricia Wentworth deserves her reputation as one of the Golden Age queens of crime.

Buy The Key from Amazon

Home

The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie

‘Light-hearted’ thriller lacks detailed plot 

The Seven Dials Mystery is
more thriller than mystery

This 1929 novel is the second book Agatha Christie wrote following her divorce from her adulterous first husband, Colonel Archibald Christie, from whom she was separated in 1927. Looking back on this time in her life, she has commented: “I was gaining confidence over my writing and felt that I would have no difficulty in producing a book every year, and possibly a few short stories as well.”

She also said that she found "light-hearted, thriller type" novels easy to write as they didn't require too much plotting or planning. This is a very revealing comment and may resonate with some readers if they have found they don’t enjoy her thrillers as much as her detective stories.

I read The Seven Dials Mystery for the second time recently because I am working through Agatha Christie’s novels in chronological order to review them all here.

Although I have found her Poirot novels keep getting better as I have been going along, I didn’t think The Seven Dials Mystery was as enjoyable as her previous thrillers, The Secret Adversary and The Man in the Brown Suit.

I found the dialogue at the opening of the book reminiscent of a Bertie Wooster novel by P G Wodehouse, when a group of young people are enjoying breakfast together at a country house party, and characters called Ronny, Pongo, and Socks, are coming up with a jolly idea for a joke to play on one of their fellow guests.

Agatha Christie can just about convince readers that the police are grateful for the help of Poirot or Miss Marple with their cases, but to believe that Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard is eager to enlist the help of Bundle, aka Lady Eileen Brent, for espionage work later in the book, is perhaps stretching credibility too far.

The original dust jacket of the
1929 first edition

The novelist Val McDermid writes, in her introduction to the 2017 paperback edition of The Seven Dials Mystery, that Agatha Christie is deliberately subverting the thriller genre to poke fun at it. This may be true, or it could be that Agatha Christie was enjoying her new freedom following her divorce and felt like writing something fun and frothy rather than putting in the hard grind to produce one of her clever, tightly plotted, detective stories that would keep the reader guessing until the end.

The review in the Times Literary Supplement of 4 April 1929 was for once markedly unenthusiastic about a Christie book, saying: "It is a great pity that Mrs Christie should in this, as in a previous book, have deserted the methodical procedure of inquiry into a single and circumscribed crime, for the romance of universal conspiracy and international rogues.”

However, my slight disappointment with The Seven Dials Mystery, which was Agatha Christie’s ninth novel, won’t deter me from reading her other thrillers when I finally get to them.

I’m looking forward now to re-reading Number 10 on the chronological list, which is Murder at the Vicarage. This 1930 mystery novel introduces her amateur detective, Miss Marple, who is my favourite Agatha Christie detective character.

Buy from Amazon

Murder After Christmas by Rupert Latimer

Serving up mystery, mince pies and merriment

Murder After Christmas is a
treat for cosy crime fans

This Christmas-themed whodunit was out of print for 75 years, meaning cosy crime fans have been missing a festive treat all that time.

First published in 1944, the little-known detective novel Murder After Christmas by Rupert Latimer has finally been made available to today’s readers by being published in the British Library Crime Classics series, and I found it an enjoyable read in the cold days after Christmas this year.

A family invite their rich old uncle to stay at their country house because, they joke, Mussolini had made it impossible for him to visit his Italian villa at Christmas as usual. He has written to them saying that his hotel in London has also been commandeered because of the war.

There are humorous remarks made about murdering the old man for his money by some members of the household before his arrival and therefore it is not much of a surprise for the reader when ‘good old Uncle Willie’, is found dead in the snow on Boxing Day dressed as Santa Claus.

His hosts, the Redpath family, appear to be kind-hearted people who had said before his arrival that they would like to give the 90-year old a good time over Christmas so that he might remember them in his will.

Other distant relatives also take an interest in Uncle Willie and visit him at the Redpath’s house in the run up to Christmas and send him parcels. Uncle Willie is known to have a sweet tooth and he enjoys lots of mince pies and chocolates before Christmas.

After his body is found, the police suspect he has been poisoned and because he is found dead during a Christmas party there are plenty of suspects for Superintendent Culley to choose from as he carries out a complex and thorough murder investigation.

Rupert Latimer tells the story in a light-hearted way, putting in plenty of seasonal touches. Only one set of footprints in the snow lead to the body. Two people are dressed as Santa Claus at the Boxing Day party to add to the confusion. And why are a stash of mince pies found sewn up inside the seat of a chair in the old man’s bedroom?

Latimer was born at Wildernesse Park in Kent, 
the home of his grandmother, Lady Hillingdon
 

Unusually, the Redpaths helpfully invite Superintendent Culley to stay with them in the dead man’s room to see if he can take suspicion away from them by solving the mystery.

Rupert Latimer was the pen name of Algernon Vernon Mills, who was born in 1905 at Wildernesse Park in Kent, the home of his grandmother, the Dowager Lady Hillingdon. 

Despite his privileged background, he had an unfortunate experience as a child during a holiday in France. After eating some strawberries growing wild, he contracted typhoid fever.

His elder sister and their nurse both died, but although he survived, he was lame afterwards and suffered from epilepsy.

As a young man, he pursued a career on the stage, working in repertory, where he met the playwright Arnold Ridley, who later became famous for his part in Dad’s Army.

Latimer also wrote some humorous novels and the detective story Death in Real Life, but then his health declined and he was diagnosed with a brain tumour and died in 1953.

It was to take until 2022 for Murder After Christmas to be reissued by British Library Crime Classics. I found it to be entertaining and well written with a satisfying ending and it was a good distraction from my own left over mince pies!

Buy Murder After Christmas from Amazon

Home