The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie

Writer’s eighth novel is far from ‘disappointing’

The cover of the 2015 edition
published by HarperCollins

Six years before Agatha Christie’s famous novel, Murder on the Orient Express, was published, the Queen of Crime wrote another Hercule Poirot mystery where a murder is committed on a train.

Unfortunately for the killer, Hercule Poirot happens to be on the train at the time, travelling from England to the French Riviera on the famous ‘train bleu.’

The Mystery of the Blue Train, which was published in 1928, is reputed to have been Christie’s least favourite story. Nevertheless, the book received a positive reaction from the Times Literary Supplement at the time, who stated that ‘the reader would ‘not be disappointed.’  The distinguished Belgian detective uses psychological reasoning to dispute the guilt of the original suspect arrested by the police and, in the words of the review, ‘lands his fish to the surprise of everyone.’

The murder victim is Ruth Kettering, an unhappily married American heiress, who is travelling to France to meet her lover. On the train, she meets Katherine Grey, who for the last ten years has been a companion to an old lady living in the village of St Mary Mead. The old lady had just died and left her a substantial inheritance and Katherine is enjoying her first chance to travel abroad.

The two women have a conversation over lunch and Ruth invites Katherine back to her compartment, where she confides in her that she has misgivings about what she is about to do and doesn’t feel happy about having deceived her own father about her trip.

Christie's detective Hercule Poirot, as
famously portrayed by David Suchet

Katherine does not see Ruth again and that evening finds herself seated opposite Hercule Poirot for dinner. The next morning, Katherine discovers that Ruth has been found dead in her compartment, having been strangled during the night.

It transpires that a famous ruby, ‘Heart of Fire,’ that has recently been given to Ruth by her wealthy father, is now missing. Later, Poirot is persuaded by Ruth’s father to take on the case and find his daughter’s murderer for him. The little Belgian detective doubts that the French police have arrested the right person and, helped by Katherine, uncovers the truth.

The Mystery of the Blue Train was priced at seven shillings and sixpence when it first went on sale in the UK.

The novel contained the first ever mention of the fictional village of St Mary Mead, which was to be the home of another of Agatha Christie’s detective, Miss Marple.

Agatha Christie is reputed to have found writing the book an ordeal, as the story did not come easily to her. At that time, she was staying in the Canary Islands while recovering from the death of her mother, her husband’s infidelity, and her own mental breakdown. In her autobiography, she stated that she had always hated the novel.

I particularly enjoyed the parts of the story set in the south of France and found the plot to be ingenious. If, like me, you are a Christie fan, you will find it well worth reading.

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Death Is No Sportsman by Cyril Hare

A fishing story with no red herrings to confuse the trail

Death Is No Sportsman was
first published in 1938

The sport of fly fishing is at the centre of the mystery in Death Is No Sportsman, Cyril Hare’s second detective novel.

A group of men, who are all devoted to the pastime, gather at a small hotel, looking forward to spending a pleasant weekend on the river bank. Although the men are not friends, they try to get on amicably so they can continue to share the fishing rights they hold jointly to a small, but desirable stretch of the river Didder.

Behind their superficial courtesy towards each other, there are clearly tensions. Also, as regular guests at the hotel, they know the local people and are aware of the passions and rivalries going on below the surface in the small community.

All this is beautifully set up by Cyril Hare in the first few pages and it will come as no surprise to the reader when a body is discovered at the side of the river the following day.

The victim is the local squire, a man who was unpopular with both the fishermen and the villagers. It is quickly established that he has been shot in the head.

The corpse is discovered by a young man connected with the fishing syndicate, soon after his arrival at the inn. He is subsequently revealed to have deep feelings for the wife of the dead man, so the stage is expertly set by the author for a mystery involving interesting characters in an evocative setting.

Cyril Hare was, in fact, the pen name for Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark, who was born in 1900 in Mickleham in Surrey and went on to become a barrister and a judge.

The writer’s pseudonym was derived from a mixture of Hare Court, where he was in Chambers as a barrister in London, and Cyril Mansions, where he lived.

Hare was a practising barrister and
judge as well as a writer

Hare wrote many short stories for the London Evening Standard and some radio and stage plays and he was a keen member of the Detection Club along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and other famous crime writers.

After the war, Hare, as Clark, was appointed a county court judge in Surrey. He died in 1958, when he was at the peak of his career as a judge and at the height of his powers as a master of the whodunit.

In 1990, when the British Crime Writers’ Association published their list of The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time, they awarded the 85th place to Hare’s 1942 novel, Tragedy at Law, which is considered by many to be his best work.

In Death Is No Sportsman, the police quickly find the murder of the local squire too complex for them to solve and call in Scotland Yard. In the following chapter, we see Inspector Mallet, ‘a very tall, very broad man, with a mild red face set off with an unexpectedly ferocious-looking waxed moustache,’ descending from the train ready to take over. He investigates with the thoroughness the reader expects of him, but the local police find his attention to detail mildly irritating.

I found Death Is No Sportsman to be an intriguing mystery that always plays fair with the reader. It was so well written that I enjoyed being guided along by Hare in the direction of the inevitable and satisfying scene at the end. The suspects have all gathered in a room at the inn next to the river where Mallet explains everything and the identity of the murderer is revealed.

Death Is No Sportsman was first published in 1938. 

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The Big Four by Agatha Christie

Poirot novel may prove a test for even his most dedicated fans

The Big Four was the
seventh Poirot novel

Rereading all Agatha Christie’s detective novels in chronological order is enabling me to enjoy her best work once again and to discover novels that I have somehow managed to overlook over the years.

I was intrigued by her seventh novel,The Big Four, which was published in 1927, because, although it features Poirot and Hastings, it is a far cry from the mystery with a country house setting that readers have come to know and love.

Poirot enters the world of international espionage in this story and races from country to country, trying to track down four master criminals who are working together to achieve world domination.

The first is Abe Ryland, an American businessman, the second is Madame Olivier, a French scientist, and the third is a sinister Chinaman called Li Chang Yen.

The fourth, who Poirot does not unmask until close to the end of the book, is able to evade him because he turns out to be a master of disguise.

The Big Four was not my favourite Poirot novel, as it was more of an espionage thriller, with Poirot chosen to be the unlikely hero whose mission is to save the world.

Delving into the background of the book, I found that it originated from 12 separate short stories that had already been published. Apparently, Agatha, who was at a low point in her life, needed to come up with a new book for her publisher. With the help of her brother-in-law, she gathered up some of her old stories, reworked them, and submitted them as a new novel to her publisher. 

But she was never satisfied with The Big Four and used to refer to it herself as ‘that rotten book.’ It came after her sixth novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which had been a spectacular success and was a tough act to follow.

The Big Four was adapted for television in 2013 starring David Suchet as Poirot. It is worth persevering with, if only to be able to say in the future that you have read every one of Agatha Christie’s 66 detective novels.

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The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

An award winning masterpiece by the Queen of Crime

The latest HarperCollins reprint
of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Agatha Christies’s sixth novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, was voted ‘the best crime novel ever’ by the British Crime Writers’ Association in 2013.

Published in 1926, the book remains Agatha’s best known and most controversial novel because of its ingenious final twist, which had a significant impact on the detective fiction genre and has been imitated by many other writers since.

Agatha, who died on 12 January, 1976 - 47 years ago today - has become famous for being the supreme exponent of the old-fashioned English crime novel. Her skill in constructing complex and puzzling plots and her ability to deceive readers until the very last page, or paragraph, are unequalled.

But this third Poirot novel, narrated by the local physician, Doctor Sheppard, in the absence of Captain Hastings, who has gone to start a new life in the Argentine, is considered by many readers and critics to be her masterpiece.

Wealthy businessman turned country squire Roger Ackroyd lives in a charming English country village, where dark secrets and dangerous emotions lurk beneath the apparently calm surface.

When Ackroyd is murdered, stabbed in the neck while sitting in his study after a dinner party at his home, there are, as usual, plenty of suspects.  

Poirot, who has just come to live in the village, after retiring to grow marrows, lives next door to Dr Sheppard. He is asked by a member of Ackroyd’s family to investigate the murder because they are worried the police will get it wrong. Suspicion has fallen on Ackroyd’s stepson, Ralph, who is a popular young man locally.

Agatha Christie died 47 years
ago today at the age of 85

After many twists and turns, Poirot gathers all the suspects together in his sitting room after dinner one night and reveals the extraordinary and unexpected identity of the killer.

According to The Home of Agatha Christie, the author’s own website, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was ‘the book that changed Agatha Christie’s career’. It was the first of her novels to be published by William Collins, which later became part of HarperCollins, who remain Agatha’s publishers today and attracted enormous attention in the media at the time.

Following her death, Agatha Christie's body was buried four days later after a service at St Mary’s Church in the village of Cholsey in Oxfordshire.

The inscription on her tombstone is a quotation from Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queen:

‘Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,

Ease after war, death after life, does greatly please.’

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The Secret of Chimneys

A light-hearted caper with a satisfying ending

The cover of the 2017 edition, 
published by Harper Collins

Agatha Christie once again chose the adventure story format for her fifth novel, The Secret of Chimneys, rather than the detective story conventions she had employed in her first and third novels, which both featured her Belgian sleuth, Hercule Poirot.

Published in 1925, The Secret of Chimneys details the exploits of a good-looking young adventurer, Anthony Cade. The story starts in Africa, moves to England and is influenced by the political intrigues going on in the Balkan state of Herzoslovakia.

Needing money and looking for a new adventure, Cade accepts two jobs from a friend. He has to deliver some potentially controversial political memoirs safely to a publisher in London and restore some stolen letters to a woman who has been blackmailed because of them.

Linking these two jobs is an English country house called Chimneys, which is famous for hosting informal weekend parties, where politicians, heads of corporations and foreign dignitaries are able to mingle socially and conduct their business privately in its comfortable surroundings.

A shooting party is to take place at Chimneys, to be hosted reluctantly by its owner, Lord Caterham, who has been asked to assist the Government. Prince Michael of Oblovic is to be a guest at the party and it is anticipated that important Government business will be done.

In the course of carrying out his tasks, Cade goes to Chimneys himself. A murder occurs in the house just after he arrives, starting off a series of fast-paced events. Cade finds himself caught up in an international conspiracy and it soon becomes obvious that someone will stop at nothing to prevent the monarchy being restored in faraway Herzoslovakia.

ITV reimagined the story as a Miss Marple
mystery, with Julie McKenzie as Marple

Despite the presence in the house of officers from both Scotland Yard and the French Surete, Cade has to pursue his own ideas in order to find the murderer, to be with Virginia, the woman he has fallen in love with, and ultimately fulfil his own destiny.  

Agatha Christie, who was born 132 years ago today in 1890, was widely praised for writing The Secret of Chimneys. Reviewers said it was more than just a murder mystery as it involved a treasure hunt. In July 1925, The Times Literary Supplement praised the ‘most unexpected and highly satisfactory ending’ of the story.

The novel has since been called ‘a first-class romp’ and been judged to be one of the author’s best early thrillers. I thought it was a light-hearted caper and found it enjoyable to read. I admired the way Agatha kept the ‘secret’ of Chimneys up her sleeve right to the end.  

The novel introduced the characters of Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard and Lady Eileen ‘Bundle’ Brent, who were both to appear in later novels.

It was the last of Agatha’s crime novels to be published by Bodley Head as the author then moved to Collins, later to become Harper Collins. It is known to have been translated into 17 different languages.

The Secret of Chimneys was adapted as a stage play by Agatha in 1931, but its world premiere did not actually take place until 2003 in Canada. It has also been adapted for television and as a graphic novel, although a version made by ITV in 2010 turned it into a Miss Marple mystery and took several other liberties with the plot.

The fictional Eastern European country of Herzoslovakia is also referenced in two Poirot stories, The Stymphalian Birds and One, Two, Buckle My Shoe.

Agatha went on to become such a popular and successful novelist that even though we are now well into the 21st century, her books are still being purchased from shops and online and are regularly borrowed from public libraries. New film and television adaptations of her wonderful stories are constantly being made and she remains the most translated individual author to this day.

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Murder in Blue

Author was a bank clerk by day and a novelist by night

A new edition of Murder in Blue
was published in 2021

Clifford Witting, who was born on this day in 1907, 115 years ago today, in Lewisham in Kent, was one of the younger of the Golden Age mystery writers. He worked as a clerk for Lloyds Bank during the day and wrote 16 detective novels in the evenings, between 1937 and 1964.

His first novel, Murder in Blue, was republished in 2021 by Galileo Publishers, making it available again for present day fans of vintage detective stories to read and enjoy. The novel was written while Witting was commuting to London for his day job and he would work on it every night, despite the distractions of becoming a young father.

Witting set a lot of his mysteries in the small town of Paulsfield in the county of Downshire behind the South Downs, which was based on the town of Petersfield in Hampshire. He included many details about Petersfield as it was in the 1930s, even describing the statue of King William III mounted on a horse that stands in the market place, although in the fictional town of his novel, he says it is the statue of a local lord.  

He had a flair for describing settings and wrote in a witty style. He also experimented with the conventions of the detective story, showing his fascination with the genre.

His protagonist in Murder in Blue, John Rutherford, runs a bookshop that stocks detective fiction. He employs a young assistant, George, who is fascinated with whodunits and is thrilled when his employer becomes involved in a real-life murder case.

Rutherford is out walking one evening when he discovers the body of a young police officer lying in a lane on the outskirts of the town. The police officer appears to have been bludgeoned to death. Rutherford tries to think quickly and uses what he believes to be the police officer’s bicycle to cycle to the police station and report the tragedy.

Clifford Witting worked as
a bank clerk by day

He is later taken back to the scene of the crime by the investigating officer, Inspector Charlton, so that he can point out the tracks he himself has left in the sodden ground and help the Inspector identify any clues that have been left by the murderer. He is also called to give evidence at the inquest and soon becomes on friendly terms with the detective.

The story is given additional interest by the complication that Rutherford has recently fallen in love with a beautiful young woman after their cars collided in the fog. A love interest in a detective story was frowned on in those days by other Golden Age writers, but in Murder in Blue it is an additional source of suspense for the reader. I found myself wondering how the relationship would turn out and whether it would have anything to do with the murder.

Witting’s two series characters, Sergeant - later Inspector - Peter Bradford and Inspector Harry Charlton, appear in most of his 16 books.

During World War II, Witting served as a bombardier in the Royal Artillery and a Warrant Officer in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. He joined the Detection Club in 1958, 11 years after the original publication of Murder in Blue, at a time when Agatha Christie was the president. Witting died in 1968 in Surrey.

Newspaper critics of the time gave his books good reviews, saying he produced interesting puzzles with ingenious solutions and that he played fair with the reader. I would definitely recommend Murder in Blue, as I think it is a good read and keeps up the whodunit element well. The novel also provides an interesting snapshot of life at the time it was set. 

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The Man in the Queue

The novel that introduces the likeable but fallible Inspector Alan Grant

The Arrow edition of The
Man in the Queue

A man is found with a stiletto in his back, having been stabbed to death while queueing for the last night of a popular West End show. The main problems for Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, who is deployed to investigate the killing, are the lack of clues to the victim’s identity and the fact that no one in the queue seems to have seen what happened.

The Man in the Queue, the first detective novel by Josephine Tey, was published in 1929, just eight years after Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and six years after Dorothy L Sayers published her first novel, Whose Body?

But unlike Poirot and Wimsey, Alan Grant is a detective by profession and not an amateur sleuth. The novel is an early version of a police procedural and shows Grant interacting with his superiors and subordinates and making use of the forensic tools the police had at their disposal in the 1920s to try to solve the case.

Josephine Tey was a pseudonym used by the writer Elizabeth MacIntosh, who was born in 1896 in Scotland. She trained as a Physical Training instructor and taught at schools in Scotland and England. In 1923 she returned to her family home in Inverness to care for her invalid mother and keep house for her father and it was then that she began writing.

The Man in the Queue was her first mystery novel and introduced her series detective, Inspector Alan Grant. It was awarded the Dutton Mystery Prize after it was published in America.

MacIntosh’s main ambition was to write a play that would have a run in the West End and her drama, Richard of Bordeaux, was such a success when it was first staged in 1932 that it was transferred to the New Theatre, now the Noel Coward Theatre, where it had a year-long run and made a household name of its young leading man, John Gielgud.

Josephine Tey was a pseudonym
used by Elizabeth MacIntosh

As Josephine Tey, MacIntosh produced six novels featuring Alan Grant. The fifth novel, The Daughter of Time, published in 1951, was voted the greatest crime novel of all time by the British Crime Writers Association in 1990.    

There is a lot to like about The Man in the Queue. There are beautiful descriptions of Tey’s native Inverness, where she sends Grant in pursuit of a suspect. All the characters, police and suspects alike, are interesting and believable. Grant is a well-rounded policeman, not just a caricature, who is looked after by his landlady, dines regularly at a French restaurant, and is popular with the ladies, making me keen to read the next book in the series, A Shilling for Candles.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the novel is the clever plot. Like other writers of the period, Tey is not afraid to show Grant arresting the wrong man and feeling dissatisfied with his solution. She also manages to keep the true identity of the murderer a secret right up to the end.  

The Man in the Queue was republished by Arrow Books in 2011.

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The Layton Court Mystery by Anthony Berkeley

First appearance by author turned sleuth Roger Sheringham

The paperback edition of The
Layton Court Mystery

The Layton Court Mystery, published in 1925, was the first detective novel by journalist Anthony Berkeley Cox, who was to become one of the founding members of the elite Detection Club.

His series detective, Roger Sheringham, is one of the guests at a country house party being held at a Jacobean mansion called Layton Court. The character, who is an author, was to feature in another ten detective novels and many short stories by Berkeley.

The party is being hosted by Victor Stanworth, a genial and hospitable man, aged about 60, who has taken Layton Court for the summer to enable him to entertain his friends in style.

At the start of the book, Sheringham has been enjoying Stanworth’s generous hospitality for three days until the party is given the grim news during breakfast that their host appeared to have locked himself in the library and shot himself.

Sheringham is not convinced that his host has committed suicide and sets out to investigate the mystery himself, using his friend, Alec Grierson, who is also in the party, as his ‘Watson’.

Anthony Berkeley was just one of the pen names used by Anthony Berkeley Cox, who died 51 years ago today (9 March 1971). He also wrote novels under the names Francis Iles and A. Monmouth Platts.

Anthony Berkeley Cox helped found the Detection Club in 1930, along with Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers. It was to become an elite dining club for British mystery writers, which met in London, under the presidency of G. K. Chesterton. There was an initiation ritual and an oath had to be sworn by new members promising not to rely on Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery Pokery, Coincidence or Act of God in their work.

Berkeley Cox wrote 19 crime novels
before returning to journalism

In The Layton Court Mystery, Sheringham does not conceal anything from his friend, Alec Grierson, and therefore the reader has the same information to help them solve the crime as the detective himself.

I found The Layton Court Mystery unexciting and stilted at the beginning, but the writing improved a lot as the book progressed.

I thought Roger Sheringham had the potential to be a good character, although some of the rather fatuous dialogue at the beginning reminded me of Lord Peter Wimsey at the start of Whose Body?  the first novel by Dorothy L Sayers that he appeared in.

Sheringham sometimes tells Grierson what detectives in books would do in particular circumstances, showing that the character, like his creator Berkeley, is a devotee of the genre.

The amateur detective jumps to a few wrong conclusions along the way and follows up each of his theories until he accepts that they are disproved. He tells the other characters that he is asking questions because he has ‘natural curiosity’, to cover up the fact he is interrogating people he doesn’t really know, which was not considered good form at the time.

He sometimes says he is looking for material for his next novel and one of the characters actually says to him: ‘Everything’s “copy” to you, you mean?’

He also finds clues, such as a footprint, a hair, a piece of a broken vase and a trace of face powder, to help him work out what has taken place in the library.

The Poisoned Chocolates Case
sold more than a million copies

Anthony Berkeley Cox was born in Watford in 1893 and educated at Sherborne School and University College, Oxford. After serving as an officer in the First World War, he began writing for magazines, such as Punch and The Humorist.

He wrote 19 crime novels between 1925 and 1939 before returning to journalism and writing for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times. From 1950 to 1970, the year before he died, he contributed to the Manchester Guardian, later, the Guardian newspaper.

Berkeley’s amateur detective, Sheringham, had his most famous outing in The Poisoned Chocolates Case, which was published in 1929. The novel received rapturous reviews and sold more than one million copies. It is now regarded as a classic of the Golden Age of detective fiction. 

At times, The Layton Court Mystery reminded me of Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley, published in 1913, which was originally intended to be a skit on the detective story genre. Like Trent, Sheringham doesn’t actually solve the case until the real murderer confesses to him right at the end.

However, by the end of The Layton Court Mystery, I had taken to Roger Sheringham and I now look forward to reading the next book in the series.

The Layton Court Mystery was first published in London by Herbert Jenkins in 1925 and in New York by Doubleday, Doran and Company in 1929. It was republished by Spitfire Publications Ltd in 2021. 

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The Man in the Brown Suit

A fast-moving thriller that keeps the reader guessing until the end

The latest paperback edition of
The Man in the Brown Suit

Reading Agatha Christie’s novels again in order of publication is proving to be good fun because there is so much variety in the early stories as Agatha tries out new characters and different slants on the detective mystery format.

Agatha’s fourth novel, The Man in the Brown Suit, published in 1924, is very different from The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Murder on the Links, the first two Poirot novels and also nothing like The Secret Adversary, her first Tommy and Tuppence novel.

The novel has a pretty young heroine, Anne Beddingfield, who has long yearned for adventures, love and romance. When her professor father dies, leaving her alone in the world with a very small sum of money, she heads to London, where she witnesses the death of a man who falls from the platform at an underground station and is electrocuted on the rails.

The police decide it is an accidental death but Anne wonders about a man in a brown suit who she saw examine the body before running away. She has picked up a piece of paper that had been dropped nearby and armed with just one cryptic clue she vows to track down the man in the brown suit and achieve justice for the dead man. The message on the paper eventually leads to her boarding a ship bound for South Africa.

According to the official Agatha Christie website, the novel was partly inspired by a tour Agatha had made of the British Commonwealth with her first husband. Afterwards, Agatha wrote the story sitting in her Earl’s Court flat, finding inspiration for her descriptions of African landscapes by evoking her memories of them.

The Man in the Brown Suit is the first of her novels to feature an appearance by Secret Service agent Colonel Race, who assists Anne in her search for the truth. Colonel Race reappears in three later novels, Cards on the Table, Death on the Nile and Sparkling Cyanide.

Agatha Christie used her first payment from her
fourth novel to buy a Morris Cowley like this one

Towards the end of the story, Agatha describes Anne’s feelings as she falls in love very convincingly and in a complete departure from the style of her writing in her previous three novels.

However, she keeps the reader guessing  as to the identity of the villain right until the end of the book in true Agatha Christie style.

The Man in the Brown Suit is less a novel of detection and more of a fast-moving thriller that is typical of its period. It had mixed reviews when it was first published because some reviewers were disappointed that it was not a Poirot novel. This seems rather unfair. Surely, they would have realised that authors like to experiment?

It was not all bad news for Agatha though, as the £500 she received for the first publication of this story paid for her first car, a grey, bullnose Morris Cowley.

Even though the novel is nearly 100 years old, I would definitely recommend giving The Man in the Brown Suit a try. 

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Grey Mask by Patricia Wentworth

Who came first: Miss Silver or Miss Marple?

Grey Mask, originally published in 1928,
was republished 90 years later

Patricia Wentworth’s first Miss Silver Mystery, Grey Mask, published in 1928, introduces an unassuming little old lady, who is continually knitting baby garments, but is actually a shrewd private detective with a brilliant mind.

Many people have assumed over the years that Miss Silver was inspired by Agatha Christie’s much-loved Miss Marple, but actually it could have been the other way round. The first Miss Marple novel, The Murder at the Vicarage, was not published until 1930, although the endearing character had made her first appearance in a short story published in The Royal Magazine in December 1927.

Whoever came first, the two old ladies might appear to be similar characters, but there are many differences between them. Miss Marple lives in a cottage in a sleepy village but is more worldly wise than she might appear. She has developed  a deep knowledge of human nature and can always refer to a useful village parallel when investigating a case, possessing the ability to pick out a villain because he reminds her of a young man that she once knew who stole from his employer, or a naughty boy who often played tricks on his teachers.

Miss Silver, however, is the real deal, as she walks the mean streets of London and takes on cases in a professional way, pitting her wits against major crime bosses.

In Grey Mask there is little explanation about who Miss Silver is, or why she has set herself up as a private investigator in London in the 1920s, but she appears to be well known in upper class circles and the hero of the story is sent to consult her on the recommendation of a friend.

Charles Moray, an explorer, has returned home after four years abroad, to find  his house unlocked, with a light burning in one of its abandoned rooms. He finds somewhere to hide and eavesdrops on what is going on in the room. A criminal gang are using his house to plot a vicious crime. Furthermore, he recognises the voice of one of the conspirators. It belongs to the woman who jilted him on the eve of his wedding four years earlier.

Patricia Wentworth wrote
32 Miss Silver novels

He cannot go to the police because he does not want his former fiancée to get into trouble, but he has to find a way to prevent the gang from committing the crime they are planning and somehow extricate the woman he used to love from the mess she seems to be in.

His friend urges him to consult Miss Silver and so Charles goes to her office. His first impression of the well-respected private detective is that she is ‘a little person with no features, no complexion, and a great deal of tidy mouse-coloured hair done in a large bun at the back of her head’. He finds that appearances can be deceptive, however, and that Miss Silver is not afraid to tackle a criminal gang who are prepared to resort to violence, kidnapping and shooting people.

Patricia Wentworth was the pen name of Dora Amy Elles, who was born in India, where her father was stationed with the British Army, in 1877. She was sent to England to be educated, but returned to India and married George Dillon in 1906. He had three children from a previous marriage and they had one child together. After his death she moved back to England with the children.

In 1920 she married again, to George Turnbull, and settled in Surrey. She had begun writing while in India and in 1910 had won the Melrose Prize for her first published novel, A Marriage Under the Terror, which was set during the French Revolution.

Under the pen name of Patricia Wentworth, she wrote 32 crime novels featuring Miss Silver, beginning with Grey Mask in 1928 and ending with Girl in the Cellar in 1961, the year of her death. Miss Silver develops as a character during the series and works closely with Scotland Yard. The reader will eventually discover she is a retired governess with a passion for Tennyson as well as for knitting.

Patricia Wentworth also wrote poetry and more than 30 other novels throughout her career.

I would recommend reading Grey Mask, which was republished by Hodder and Stoughton in 2018 and is available again in some public libraries. It is a well-written story told from multi viewpoints and, although it is typical of the sensational crime fiction of its time, such as Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence novels and Margery Allingham’s Mr Campion books, it has an intriguing mystery at its heart, which is not revealed until the end.

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How it all started for the Queen of Crime

Remembering Agatha Christie’s writing roots on the anniversary of her birth

As a child, Agatha Christie
taught herself to read

Agatha Christie, who was to become the best-selling novelist of all time, was born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller on 15 September 1890 in a district of Torquay in Devon.

Her arrival at the home of her parents, Ashfield, in Barton Road in Tor Mohun, took place 131 years ago today. Agatha became such a popular and successful novelist that even though we are now well into the 21st century, her books are still being purchased from shops and on line and are regularly borrowed from public libraries. New film and television adaptations of her wonderful stories are constantly being made and she remains the most translated individual author to this day.

Agatha was educated at home and even though her mother did not want her to learn to read until she was eight, Agatha had taught herself to read by the time she was five.

She enjoyed the children’s stories of her time by authors such as Edith Nesbit and Louisa M Alcott, but also read poetry and thrillers at a young age.

By the time she was 18 she was writing short stories herself and had learnt French from her governess, the family having spent time living in France. This was to come in useful when she invented her little Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. She also visited Cairo for three months with her mother, an experience she was to draw on later for some of her novels.

The latest edition of 
Christie's 1920 debut novel

It was during the First World War that she turned to writing detective stories while she was working in a hospital dispensary. She responded to a bet made with her sister Madge, who challenged her to try to write a good detective story, and she worked out the plot for her debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, while working at Torbay Hospital. She had recently completed the examination of the Society of Apothecaries and was able to put her newly acquired knowledge of poisons to good use.

Agatha was unsuccessful to begin with and suffered six consecutive rejections from publishers. If she’d given up at that point the world would never have had the huge body of work that has entertained so many millions of people over the years.

The turning point came for Agatha when her novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920, when she was 30 years of age, and she never looked back. She went on to write a total of 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections. She also wrote the world’s longest running play, The Mousetrap, which was performed in London’s West End  from 1952 to 2020, when the theatre had to be closed down because of Covid 19 restrictions.

Her novel And Then There Were None is one of the top-selling books of all time, with approximately 100 million copies sold.

Agatha was co-president of the elite Detection Club  from 1958 to her death in 1976. In the 1971 New Year Honours she was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

When her death was announced, two West End theatres, St Martin’s, where The Mousetrap was playing, and the Savoy, which was at the time staging Murder at the Vicarage, dimmed their outside lights in her honour.

Her novels have never gone out of print and are constantly being republished with new cover designs and in different formats.

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Look to the Lady

Third Campion mystery features an ancient relic, witches, gypsies and a ruthless gang

Look to the Lady involves Campion searching
for a 'monster' hiding in Suffolk woodland

Margery Allingham was well into her stride writing about her mysterious, amateur sleuth, Albert Campion, when she published her third novel about his adventures, Look to the Lady, in 1931, just two years after his first appearance in The Crime at Black Dudley. 

Campion and his butler and ex-offender sidekick, Magersfonteing Lugg, rescue the son of a baronet, Val Gyrth, from violent criminals attempting to kidnap him. They offer to help him prevent the theft of a rare family heirloom, the Gyrth Chalice, but as soon as they arrive with him at his family home in Suffolk, they discover his aunt has been found dead in mysterious circumstances.

Campion sets out to solve the mystery of the aunt’s death and work out how to protect the valuable chalice, which the Gyrth family have been guarding for the nation for more than a thousand years. 

To solve the mystery, Campion has to go out with an elderly professor to try to find the ‘monster’ hiding in nearby woodland that has been terrorising the local people for years. 

Look to the Lady has been
republished by Vintage Books

After infiltrating the headquarters of the gang plotting to steal the chalice, Campion is imprisoned by them, until a band of gypsies helps him to escape. 

Then he has to ride a wild, black horse five miles across open countryside to be in time to prevent the theft of the chalice from its home high up in a tower. 

Although Margery Allingham was writing during the Golden Age of detective fiction, Look to the Lady is less of a cosy, village mystery and more of a sophisticated, fast-moving novel of suspense.

Agatha Christie has been quoted as saying: ‘Margery Allingham stands out like a shining light,’ and, in her day, Margery was regarded as one of the four Queens of Crime, along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Ngaio Marsh. 

Look to the Lady was first published in Great Britain by Jarrolds more than 90 years ago, but it has now been republished by Vintage Books, part of the Penguin Random House Group. It remains an exciting, addictive page turner and I can highly recommend it.

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(Suffolk woodland photo by Benjamin Thomas via Pixabay)

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