Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay

No Oxford degree for author but she found a good setting for a crime novel

The murder at the heart of this mystery occurs on the
River Cherwell, still popular with students today

Death on the Cherwell, a classic Golden Age detective story by Mavis Doriel Hay published in 1935, is set in a fictitious women’s college in Oxford. The novel appeared during the same year as Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers, which was also set in a women’s college in Oxford. Both settings were loosely based on the colleges the authors had attended themselves.

Mavis writes at the beginning of the first chapter: ‘Undergraduates, especially those in their first year, are not, of course, quite sane or quite adult.’ The students featured in this novel come across as very young indeed, more like the girls in boarding school stories than intelligent students. Nevertheless, they make good amateur sleuths, who are as entertaining as they are industrious.

A group of first year girls, who have formed a secret society that meets on the roof of the Persephone College boathouse, come across the dead body of the college bursar lying in her canoe. She is later discovered to have drowned in the river but it is a mystery how her body ended up back in her own boat.

The police are called in but to begin with they assume it is a student prank that has got out of hand. However, the group of young ladies who found the body immediately suspect foul play and take the investigation into their own hands. 

Led by Sally Watson, whose older sister, Beryl, appeared in Murder Underground, the first crime novel by Mavis Doriel Hay, the undergraduates uncover the tangled secrets that led to the bursar’s death and follow up clues that point in the direction of a fellow student.

The British Library Crime Classics
edition of Death on the Cherwell

Mavis Doriel Hay, who was born on either 12 or 13 February 1894, 130 years ago, in Potters Bar in Middlesex, attended St Hilda’s College in Oxford between 1913 and 1916. She published three mystery novels within just three years in the 1930s, Murder Underground, Death on the Cherwell, and the Santa Klaus Murder. 

After Murder Underground was published, Dorothy L Sayers wrote a review in the Sunday Times saying: ‘This detective novel is much more than interesting. The numerous characters are well differentiated, and include one of the most feckless, exasperating, and lifelike literary men that ever confused a trail.’

That exasperating literary man, Basil Pongleton makes an appearance in the author’s second novel, Death on the Cherwell, when he and his wife, Beryl, are visiting Beryl’s sister, Sally, in Oxford. But Sally doesn’t need any help from him to uncover the truth about the bursar’s death and her sleuthing efforts even earn her the respect of the investigating officer in the case, Detective Inspector Braydon.

Like Dorothy L Sayers, Mavis attended Oxford when women were allowed into the university to study, but were not allowed to graduate, and so she left the university empty handed. But because she was interested in the industries and handicrafts of rural Britain, she was later sponsored by the Agricultural Economics Research Institute of Oxford University to collaborate with another writer, Helen Fitzrandolph, on a series of works surveying rural industries

She went on to marry Helen Fitzrandolph’s brother, Archibald Menzies Fitzrandolph, in 1929. Sadly, he was killed in a flying accident during World War II. 

Mavis, who was also interested in quilting, went on to publish several books on crafts during her life. She died in 1979 at the age of 85.

Nearly 90 years after it was first published, Death on the Cherwell was republished by British Library Crime Classics. In his introduction to the novel in 2014, crime writer Stephen Booth regrets that Mavis Doriel Hay had such a short literary career and published just three detective novels. He says it is ‘even sadder’ that she was almost forgotten by crime fiction readers for so many years after her death and he was delighted that the British Library editions of her books were finally remedying that oversight.

I am sure lovers of classic crime novels will be glad to have the opportunity to get to know this author and will be fascinated by her portrayal of life inside a women’s college in Oxford, in the days when female students weren’t even considered worthy of being awarded degrees by the university they attended. 

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(River Cherwell pic by Steve Daniels via Wikimedia Commons)

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The Clock Strikes 12 by Patricia Wentworth

Victim sets a New Year deadline for his own murder

The Clock Strikes Twelve is the
seventh Miss Silver mystery

James Paradine, a wealthy businessman, announces at a family dinner on New Year’s Eve that valuable blueprints have been stolen from his study and he will give the culprit until midnight to come to him and confess.

It will come as no surprise to seasoned readers of the classic crime novel that early the next morning Paradine is found dead in the grounds of his home.

In The Clock Strikes 12, the seventh mystery by Patricia Wentworth to feature her prim governess-turned-private detective, Miss Silver, there are plenty of suspects for the reader to consider. The late James Paradine had a grown-up family, some of who are married, and many of them are actively involved in his business.

The characters and different situations of the family and staff living in the house are well described by the author, making them seem real to the reader, something that was unusual for a Golden Age classic crime novel.

There is also a strong subplot about the thwarted relationship between Phyllida, the beautiful adopted daughter of Paradine’s sister, and Elliot, a talented young designer working for Paradine who is crucial to the success of the family firm. The couple were married briefly, but have been apart for nearly a year for reasons that are slowly and cleverly revealed by the author.

Miss Silver is called in by a member of the family to try to help solve the murder and she is allowed by the police to work alongside their investigating officers. She has to unravel an elaborate tangle of alibis, motives, and clues to get to the truth.

Patricia Wentworth was
fond of quoting poetry

Placidly sitting knitting in the background, Miss Silver emerges as a more distinct personality in this novel, which was first published in 1945, than she perhaps did in the earlier stories about her investigations.

The novelist Patricia Wentworth, who was born in 1877 in British India, wrote 32 novels in the classic whodunnit style featuring her character Maud Silver, a retired governess and teacher who has set up as a professional private investigator in London.

Fond of quoting from the poetry of Lord Tennyson, Miss Silver often works closely with Scotland Yard. She sees and hears everything and has a brilliant mind. From her observations, she cleverly works out what has happened in each of her cases and is able to explain how to expose the murderer.

IThe Clock Strikes 12 is a clever, well plotted mystery, perfect for reading in the days after Christmas while relaxing in front of the fire.

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Miss Silver Intervenes by Patricia Wentworth

A blend of blackmail, murder and romance makes for an intriguing mystery

Miss Silver Intervenes is
the sixth Miss Silver mystery

We learn more about the character of Miss Silver in this sixth book by Patricia Wentworth featuring the ex-governess turned private investigator.

She is no longer just a little old lady sitting in the background knitting, but is shown to be well respected by the police, who treat her as an equal and give her full access to their investigation in this story.

The mystery involves residents who live in eight flats in Vandeleur House, an old converted mansion in Putney. The characters are beautifully drawn by Patricia Wentworth and I found myself enticed into their world and wanting to keep turning the pages of the novel to find out more about them.

Miss Silver comes into the story when one of the residents, Mrs Underwood, who she has met once through mutual friends, calls on her unexpectedly at her flat. Although Mrs Underwood is reluctant to admit why she has come to see Miss Silver, she eventually reveals that she is being blackmailed and needs help.

Mrs Underwood can't bring herself to tell Miss Silver the full details of what has been happening to her, but later, when Miss Silver reads that another resident living in the same block of flats has been murdered, she decides to take matters into her own hands and manages to get herself invited to stay at Vandeleur House.

Mrs Underwood is living there with her niece by marriage, Meade, who is recovering from the shock of being in a shipwreck in which her fiancé, Giles, was drowned. Then one day while she is out shopping, Meade encounters Giles, who was rescued from the sea but has now lost his memory.

Patricia Wentworth (above) again
spins an intriguing mystery

Miss Silver wastes no time in getting to know the other residents in the flats and finding out about their relationships with each other using her considerable skills as a conversationalist.

There is a middle aged couple whose marriage has been put under strain by the husband’s obsession with the attractive young woman who lives in the flat above them. A pleasant young woman is clearly being bullied by the domineering mother she lives with. An elderly spinster is struggling to survive financially because of her income being affected by the wartime economy. An elderly woman is being cared for by her maid and a companion, and there is a single man who keeps himself to himself so that no one knows what his occupation is.

When the police investigating the murder find out that Miss Silver is staying with her friend, Mrs Underwood, they invite her to join forces with them but the relationship becomes somewhat strained when they opt for a simpler explanation for the murder than the theory Miss Silver has put forward.

However, they eventually have to admit they were wrong when the old lady, with a fondness for the poetry of Tennyson, manages to unravel what has been going on at Vandeleur House while simultaneously knitting a pair of socks for her relative in the air force.

During the story, Miss Silver also makes a new friend in one of the investigating officers, Sergeant Frank Abbott, who is invited to the celebratory tea party in her flat at the end of the novel.

I would say the only weak point in the plot is that Miss Silver uses her knowledge of a previous blackmailing case to help her identify the murderer, which gives her an advantage over the police and the reader. But nevertheless, I found Miss Silver Intervenes, first published in 1944, to be extremely well written and enjoyable.

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The Devil at Saxon Wall by Gladys Mitchell

Madness and witchcraft in a village that seems to be living in the Middle Ages

The Devil at Saxon Wall is
the sixth Mrs Bradley mystery

Probably the most bizarre Mrs Bradley mystery yet, The Devil at Saxon Wall, the sixth novel about the eccentric psychoanalyst and amateur detective, published in 1935, is the first of a number of Gladys Mitchell’s books to feature the theme of witchcraft.

The story was inspired after Gladys heard a lecture on witchcraft by her friend, the detective fiction writer Helen Simpson, and she dedicated this book to her.

Mrs Bradley has advised her best-selling novelist friend, Hannibal Jones, who has had a breakdown and is suffering from writer’s block, to retreat to a quiet, rustic village to find rest and inspiration for his work. 

Although the village of Saxon Wall might seem the perfect rural escape to begin with, Jones soon finds himself intrigued by the odd characters among the villagers and their pagan beliefs.

He also finds himself compelled to try to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding Neot House, a place where a young couple died soon after the birth of their first child.

It is a hot summer and the villagers are desperate for rain because they are short of water. They decide the local vicar is to blame for the lack of water and Jones has to step in to defend him when their anger drives them to march on the vicarage armed with weapons.

Gladys Mitchell tells the story with
the skill that was her hallmark

Jones makes some enquiries to try to sort out what happened to two babies who he thinks may have been swapped at birth, but when a man from the village is found bludgeoned to death, he decides he must call in Mrs Beatrice Lestrange Bradley to help him.

The strangely dressed old lady with her hideous cackle is more than a match for the angry villagers and she proceeds to root out the devil at Saxon Wall using her own unique and unorthodox methods.

At the end of the novel, Mrs Bradley expresses the opinion that the inhabitants of Saxon Wall are incapable of making straightforward statements. She thinks that this peculiarity dates back to the days of the Norman conquest when the Saxons of those parts, too cunning to tell direct lies to their overlords, resorted to maddening half statements and obscure pronouncements, which made them difficult to understand.

Although the characters and situations are bizarre, the novel presents an intriguing mystery which Mrs Bradley skilfully unravels and the story is well told by Gladys, who helpfully provides ‘End Papers’ to clarify issues for the reader.

I found The Devil at Saxon Wall entertaining and enjoyable and well worth reading.  

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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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Mystery in White by J. Jefferson Farjeon

A ‘creepy’ Christmas story with all the classic festive ingredients

John Jefferson Farjeon was a journalist who
went on to be a successful novelist

When a group of passengers trapped on a snowbound train on Christmas Eve decide to take their chances in the ‘curtain of whirling white’ to try to find shelter, the scene is set for an intriguing seasonal mystery.

No one answers the bell at the first house they find, but when they try the door handle it turns and they stumble inside with relief. The fires are lit, the table is set for tea, but surprisingly there is nobody at home.

It is obvious the occupants would not have ventured out in such extreme weather conditions unless there had been an emergency and the house has clearly been prepared for guests, so despite uncomfortable feelings of guilt, the train travellers warm themselves by the fire, eat the tea that has been prepared and set out to solve the mystery.

The main sleuthing brain belongs to an elderly gentleman, Mr Edward Maltby, of the Royal Psychical Society, who uses a mixture of reasoned logic and psychic intuition to try to work out what has happened to the occupants of the house.

He is ably assisted by a bright young man, David Carrington and his cheerful sister, Lydia, who has practical skills. A chorus girl, Jessie, who has fallen in the snow and sprained her ankle, a young clerk called Thomson who succumbs to ‘flu, Hopkins, an elderly bore, and Smith, a rough man who turns out to be a criminal, complete the Christmas house party.

Mystery in White is published as
a British Library Crime Classic

The author of Mystery in White, Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, was a crime and mystery novelist, playwright, and screen writer. Born in 1883, Farjeon worked for ten years for Amalgamated Press in London before going freelance. He went on to become the author of more than 60 crime and mystery novels, short story collections and plays.

He was a major figure during the Golden Age of murder mysteries between the two world wars and Dorothy L Sayers praised him for being ‘quite unsurpassed for creepy skill in mysterious adventures.’

Farjeon was named after his maternal grandfather, Joseph Jefferson, who was an American actor. His father, Benjamin Farjeon, was a successful novelist, one of his brothers was a composer, another a drama critic and director, and his sister, Eleanor Farjeon, wrote poems, including the words for the hymn, Morning Has Broken.

Originally published in 1937, Mystery in White was republished as a British Library Crime Classic in 2014. Like most Golden Age mysteries, it has a satisfying, logical conclusion, brought about by the deductive powers of Mr Maltby and the heroics of David.

At the end of the story, the police inspector, who manages to reach the house on Christmas Day, remarks to his sergeant: “Four murders in a dozen hours! I reckon I’ve earned my bit of turkey.”

When the owners of the house return they are happy to forgive the intrusion by the party from the train. As Lydia had said earlier to the chorus girl, Jessie: “Suppose this house belonged to you and you returned to it after the world’s worst snowstorm, would you rather find your larder empty or seven skeletons?" 

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Death at the Opera by Gladys Mitchell

Inoffensive’ female victim had a long list of enemies

The Death at the Opera edition
published by Vintage Publishing

Mrs Bradley uses all her skills as a psychoanalyst to find out who is guilty of the murder of a teacher during a performance of the comic Gilbert and Sullivan opera The Mikado at an experimental co-educational school.

Author Gladys Mitchell evokes the school setting very well, revealing what she thought of some of the work and the rituals she herself was involved in during her long career as a schoolteacher.

Eccentric sleuth Mrs Bradley is called in to investigate by the headmaster of Hillmaston School after a young arithmetic teacher is found drowned in a cloakroom before she can make her entrance during the opera production in the role of Katisha.  Another teacher had to take over the part at the last minute and gave a magnificent performance.

Mrs Bradley is very clever in the way she talks to both staff and pupils and persuades them to open up to her. Gladys comes up with some believable, if eccentric characters, revealing what she must have thought about some of her teaching colleagues over the years.

The author brings back the Reverend Noel Wells, who was Mrs Bradley’s ‘Watson’ in her fourth novel, The Saltmarsh Murders. He becomes Mrs Bradley's sleuthing partner again when she travels to Bognor Regis to investigate the murder victim’s past. At one stage he puts his own life in danger to test one of her theories.

They encounter a man who has been acquitted in court of murdering his wife and Mrs Bradley, showing no fear, offers herself as bait in order to see what he is capable of. With the help of Noel, she ends up solving a different murder.

Author Gladys Mitchell keeps the
reader guessing until the final pages

Death at the Opera, originally published in 1934, is written in a very elegant and witty style and Mrs Bradley is presented as a more rounded person and less of a caricature than she was in the earlier books.

The detective cleverly draws up a list of people with a motive, and a list of those with the opportunity to commit the crime. She eventually dismisses all the people with a motive and all the people who had the opportunity. She then makes a list of all the attributes the murderer must have had to commit the crime and not give themselves away. This helps her to solve the case.

Mrs Bradley also solves the offstage murder of a woman who has drowned in an ornamental pond in the grounds of a mental hospital, who had been the wife of the music teacher at the school.

Gladys keeps the reader guessing until the last pages of the book, when she produces an incredible surprise.

I would agree with a review in the Observer newspaper, which said: “Mrs Lestrange Bradley is by far the best and most vital English female detective.” I think her fifth outing in Death at the Opera shows her at her most bizarre and brilliant.

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Vintage Murder by Ngaio Marsh

Novelist draws on her love for New Zealand and the theatre

Vintage Murder begins as Roderick Alleyn
makes a train journey across New Zealand 

Ngaio Marsh transports her upper class, English sleuth, Roderick Alleyn, to her native New Zealand in Vintage Murder, her fifth novel to feature the Scotland Yard detective.

Alleyn is on holiday while recovering from an operation and the story begins as he makes a long journey by train across New Zealand. On the train, he encounters a travelling theatrical troupe and among them is Susan Max, a character actress he had met in Enter a Murderer, Ngaio’s second novel. The detective had encountered the actress while he was investigating a murder that occurred on stage during the performance of a play at a West End theatre.

He gets talking to different members of the troupe, which is run by Incorporated Playhouses, and it is not far into the story when Alfred Meyer, the owner of Incorporated Playhouses, who is married to the leading lady, Carolyn Dacres, reveals to Alleyn that someone has tried to push him off the train.

After the train has arrived at its destination, Carolyn invites Alleyn to see the first night of the play and to her birthday celebrations with the rest of the company on the stage afterwards. At the party, as a surprise for his wife, Meyer has arranged for a jeroboam of champagne to descend gently on to the dinner table from above, but something goes horribly wrong and the theatrical manager is killed.

The latest HarperCollins edition
of Ngaio Marsh's Vintage Murder

It soon becomes obvious that the mechanism set up for the stunt has been tampered with and Alleyn is invited by the local police to sit in on their investigation. He sets aside his holiday plans to try to help them catch the murderer.

Vintage Murder, which was published in 1937, enables Ngaio Marsh to describe the scenery of her homeland as seen through Alleyn’s eyes. He meets a Māori doctor, Rangi Te Pokiha, and buys a Māori fertility pendant, a ‘tiki’, which plays an important part in the plot.

Vintage Murder was one of four Alleyn novels adapted for New Zealand television in 1977, when the role of Alleyn was played by the actor George Baker.

Ngaio’s inspiration for the travelling theatrical troupe was the Alan Wilkie Company, which she was once a part of, so it is not surprising that the characters and their behaviour come across as so real in the story.

The story does consist of a long series of interviews conducted by Alleyn along with the New Zealand police officers, which many on line reviewers have complained about, but I still think it is a well written novel that presents a good mystery for the armchair detective to try to solve, and I would recommend it.

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The true identity of detective novelist Michael Innes

Academic created a series detective who went on to have a 50-year career

The cover of the Agora Books
edition of the first Appleby novel

Michael Innes, who has entertained millions of crime fiction fans with his novels and short stories featuring Scotland Yard Detective Inspector John Appleby, was also a distinguished academic who was well known for his works of literary criticism.

Innes, who was born in 1906 in Edinburgh, 116 years ago today, was, in fact, John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who became a university professor and published more than 20 contemporary novels and volumes of short stories under his real name.

Between 1936 and 1986, Stewart, writing under the pseudonym, Michael Innes, also published nearly 50 crime novels and short stories.  

The author had attended Edinburgh Academy and went on to study English Literature at Oriel College, Oxford. He went to Vienna to study psychoanalysis and on his return became a lecturer in English at the University of Leeds.

He became Jury Professor in English at the University of Adelaide in South Australia and then a lecturer in English at the Queen’s University of Belfast.

In 1949, he became a Student of Christ Church, Oxford, a position that was the equivalent of being a Fellow at other Oxford colleges. He was a professor of the university by the time of his retirement from academia in 1973.

Innes was able to use his knowledge of university life as the setting for his first Appleby novel, Death at the President’s Lodging, which features a murder at a fictitious college belonging to a fictitious university.

The reader first sees Appleby being driven out of Scotland Yard in ‘a great yellow Bentley’ to the crime scene in the President’s Lodging at St Anthony’s College, which purports to be at a university situated in the vicinity of Bletchley, about halfway between Oxford and Cambridge. A useful line-drawing of a map showing the layout of St Anthony’s had been provided for the reader at the beginning of the book.

John Innes Mackintosh Stewart - alias
Michael Innes - pictured in 1973

In the first paragraph on the first page, Innes announces that the President of St Anthony’s College, Josiah Umpleby, has been found murdered in his lodging.  Appleby has been quickly dispatched on the orders of the Home Secretary to take over from the local Inspector and handle the investigation.

Inspector Dodd, who is an old friend of Appleby’s, explains that the college is locked up at the same time every night and only a small, select group have their own keys and would have been able to access the President’s Lodging. He shows Appleby the dead body, still lying in the President’s library, with its head swathed in a black, academic gown, next to a skull and a scattering of human bones.

By the end of the first chapter, Appleby has realised he is up against an ingenious and somewhat whimsical murderer. The scene has been set and the hunt is on, with the reader able to sit back and enjoy the rest of the novel.

The story is told in an entertaining writing style and Innes allows his own interest in the genre of detective stories to shine through in conversations Appleby has with the dons while staying in their college as a guest.

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Danger Point by Patricia Wentworth

Not so much a whodunit, more a question of who is trying to do it

Danger Point was first 
published in 1941

The self-effacing, elderly lady detective, Maud Silver, is sitting on a train about to depart to London when a young woman who is clearly very upset bursts into her compartment.

The woman is a wealthy heiress, Lisle Jerningham, who has recently got married and should have been blissfully happy. But she has overheard a sinister conversation in the garden of a country house, which has terrified her.

Lisle confides in Miss Silver about fleeing from the house party she had been attending after hearing total strangers discussing how her husband’s first wife died in an apparent accident. After Lisle’s new husband inherited his first wife’s considerable fortune, he was able to save his family home. The unknown people seemed to think her husband was broke again and were speculating about whether he would attempt to engineer a second convenient misadventure.

Miss Silver does her best to calm Lisle down and gives the distraught young woman her business card in case she wants to consult her professionally at any time.

But the beautiful heiress has mixed emotions once she has started to feel better. She loves her new husband, Dale Jerningham, and can’t allow herself to believe that he would wish to harm her, even though she has started to wonder about a recent incident when she nearly drowned while swimming with him and other members of his family.

Miss Silver does not know whether Lisle really is in danger or is simply being paranoid. But after another attempt is made on Lisle’s life, the young wife gets in touch with her at her London office and then subsequently cancels the appointment she has made. After reading in the newspaper that another young woman has been found dead near Lisle’s coastal home, the detective decides to travel there in order to investigate further.

Danger Point is Patricia Wentworth’s fourth Miss Silver novel and was first published in 1941. Like her previous Miss Silver story, Lonesome Road, it  involves a rich young woman who someone is trying to kill. But is it Lisle’s handsome husband, another member of his family, or a disgruntled former employee?

Patricia Wentworth could draw
on a depth of life experiences

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 eventually discovers she is a retired governess with a passion for Tennyson as well as for knitting.

I would recommend Danger Point, which is very well written with good descriptions of the coastal scenery that form the backdrop for the story. Patricia maintains the mystery and the suspense right until the end. It is less a question of whodunit and more a matter of the reader finding out who is trying to do it.

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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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Bats in the Belfry by E C R Lorac

Remembering an early writer of the police procedural

The British Library Crime
Classics edition

Bats in the Belfry, the 13th novel in the series featuring Chief Inspector MacDonald of Scotland Yard by E C R Lorac, has a complex plot with the focus on the way detectives in the 1930s used standard police procedure to solve cases.

First published in 1937, the novel may seem rather dated in 2022, but it is fast moving and presents a challenging puzzle for the reader. It was reissued in 2018 by the British Library in their Crime Classics series and is now also available in large print.

Bats in the Belfry is the story of a failed novelist and his wife, a successful actress, who lead separate lives in their smart house in London. When the husband is called away suddenly to Paris, he seems to disappear completely. His suitcase and passport are later found in a sinister artist’s studio, the Belfry, in a dilapidated house in Notting Hill.

The novelist’s friends set out to investigate what has happened to him but find things at the Belfry are so sinister they decide to enlist the help of the police and Chief Inspector Macdonald, already an established series character, takes over the case.

By the time Lorac wrote Bats in the Belfry, she was an experienced writer of whodunnits and had developed the skill of being able to shift suspicion from one character to another while keeping up the interest for the reader.

The opening scene introduces most of the characters who will play a central part in the story. They have gathered together following a funeral and before long the conversation turns to the subject of how to dispose of a body. This conversation contains a vital clue for those alert enough to spot and remember it…

E C R Lorac was the pen name of Edith Caroline Rivett, who died 64 years ago today. She wrote under the pseudonyms E C R Lorac, Carol Carnac and Mary Le Bourne during the Golden Age of Detective fiction. 

Lorac chose her pseudonym because it was the name Carol, which was part of her name, spelt backwards. Her first detective novel, Murder on the Burrows, which introduced Chief Inspector Macdonald, was published in 1931 when she was 37. She wrote 48 mysteries as E C R Lorac and 23 as Carol Carnac along with other novels, short stories and radio and stage plays, before her death in 1958.  

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