A murky tale
of murder with an eccentric cast of suspects
Death of a Busybody is the third Inspector Littlejohn mystery
The writer of Death
of a Busybody, George Bellairs, was bank manager Harold Blundell by day.
Blundell must have been a keen student of
human nature while working at his bank
in Manchester because many of the characters he depicts in this story display
unusual quirks and idiosyncrasies.
The busybody referred to in the title
of the book is Miss Ethel Tither, who has made herself deeply unpopular in the
quaint English village of Hilary Magna, by going out of her way to snoop on
people and interfere with their lives.
When Miss Tither is found floating in
the vicar’s cesspool, having been bludgeoned by an attacker before being left
to drown in the drainage water, the local police quickly feel they are out of
their depth and call in Scotland Yard.
Inspector Thomas Littlejohn, the
author’s series detective, arrives by train and finds there is no shortage of
suspects in the case. He must piece together the clues quickly in order to find
out who was responsible for the murder of the busybody and restore order and
calm in the village.
This is the third Littlejohn novel by
George Bellairs, who was born Harold Blundell in 1902 near Rochdale in
Lancashire. He wrote more
than 50 novels, most of them featuring Littlejohn,
starting with Littlejohn on Leave, published in 1941 and finishing with An Old
Man Dies, published just before his own death in 1982.
Death of a Busybody was published in
1942. While he was writing it, Bellairs was working in a bank during the day and
acting as an air raid warden at night, having been exempted from military
service because he was blind in one eye. He had discovered that writing a
detective novel helped to pass the time during the blackout.
Bellairs was bank manager Harold Blundell in his day job
Bellairs wrote amusing stories that
gave his readers welcome light relief during the war years and in the difficult
decades that followed. For example, in Death of a Busybody, one of the
detectives assisting Littlejohn goes to interview a retired accountant whose
hobby is bird watching and who writes about his ornithological studies. The two
becomes friends and the detective also becomes a bird enthusiast. At the end of
the novel, it is revealed that they have subsequently published a joint treatise
about birds and have presented a copy to Inspector Littlejohn. This is an
example of the author’s mischievous sense of humour revealing itself in what is
essentially a classic mystery novel.
Another delightful aspect of the
novel is the way Bellairs depicts rural life at the beginning of the 1940s. He
reveals some of the eccentricities of the local population with great humour,
in a similar way to Gladys Mitchell in her Mrs Bradley mystery, The Devil at
Saxon Wall, which was published in 1935.
Although his books were also published
in the US and translated into other languages, Bellairs regarded crime writing
as a hobby and he continued to write for pleasure rather than profit. After his
death, his books became largely forgotten by the wider public, which was a great pity
First editions in dust jackets of early
books by Bellairs are now quite rare and therefore collectable and fetch high
prices. But now some of his books are available to new readers thanks to the
British Library Crime Classics series, enabling 21st century detective story
fans to enjoy his mysteries and find pleasure once again in his gentle humour.
Six people
didn’t regret the death of the victim, one of them committed murder
Five Red Herrings was the sixth Lord Peter Wimsey novel
Five Red
Herrings, published in 1931, has Galloway in Scotland as its backdrop and is peopled
by a large cast of colourful characters, many of who are artists who enjoy
fishing.
The novel is
the sixth by Dorothy to feature her amateur sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, who is
holidaying in Scotland and amusing himself by living the simple life in a
cottage, although he is accompanied by his manservant, Bunter, who attends to
his every need.
Early in the
novel, Wimsey comes across the dead body of an artist in a stream and finds an
easel nearby with a half-finished painting that is still wet.
It is
assumed that the painter, Campbell, who is a heavy drinker and has quarrelled
with most of the other artists in the area, has fallen into the stream
accidentally and has fractured his skull, causing his death.
However,
Wimsey notices that there is an important item missing from the crime scene and
suspects Campbell has been murdered and that another artist has painted the
picture, skilfully faking Campbell’s distinctive style.
He shares
this information with the police officers who arrive at the scene, but Dorothy
doesn’t reveal to the reader the identity of the important missing item, although
she puts all the information Wimsey had at the time at the disposal of the
reader so they can work it out for themselves.
And so, once
again, we’re off! The police know of Wimsey’s reputation and invite the English
Lord to join the investigation, giving him full access to all the information
they obtain during their enquiries, which Dorothy shares with the reader.
Ian Carmichael played Lord Peter Wimsey in the BBC TV adaptations of the stories
There are
six other artists living in the area who could have painted the picture in
Campbell’s style. They are all rather elusive and seem to have something to
hide. Wimsey concludes that five of them must be red herrings, but must
investigate them all. He visits all six in their workshops and hangs around,
watching them work and noting their individual habits.
It is complicated
for the reader to differentiate between the six artists and their various homes
and financial circumstances. Their alibis involve intricacies such as train
timetables, different bicycles, the technicalities of various ticket punchers at
stations and railway accounting procedure.
The reader
is not helped by Dorothy faithfully reproducing in her dialogue the different
Scottish accents and dialect words used by the characters, which sometimes makes
the novel a difficult read.
At the end
of the story, Wimsey carries out a
reconstruction of the events that take place during the 24 hours leading up to
the murder, to try to convince the police that his theory about the identity of
the murderer, which differs from their own, is the correct one.
It is a
complicated story, with perhaps too many suspects, but Dorothy plays fair with
the reader, as always, and makes it theoretically possible to work out the whodunit
element of the novel, if the reader is clever enough. She describes the Scottish
setting evocatively and convincingly, her knowledge of, and love for the area, shining
through.
Five Red
Herringswill particularly appeal to readers who enjoy the puzzle aspect of
detective novels.
A classic
mystery novel set in and around the Northern Line
The British Library Crime Classics edition of Murder Underground
Murder
Underground, the first detective novel by Mavis Doriel Hay, is underpinned by a
very clever plot. It has a satisfying ending and enjoyable resolution scenes that
wrap up the individual stories of the characters and I found it to be a very
good read.
First
published in 1934, during the Golden Age of British crime fiction, the setting
for this classic mystery novel is the Northern Line of the underground in
London.
When Miss Pongleton,
who is considered by others to be a tiresome old spinster, is found murdered on
the stairs at Belsize Park Station, her fellow boarders at the Frampton Hotel
are not exactly overwhelmed by grief, but they all have their theories about
the identity of her murderer.
They help to
unravel the mystery of who killed ‘Pongle’ with the help of Tuppy the terrier, the
victim’s dog, and each play their part in the events that lead to the dramatic conclusion.
There is of
course an official police investigation,
led by Inspector Caird, but he is in the background for most of the story and it
is the amateur sleuths at the Frampton Hotel who unearth the clues and finally make
sense of the different pieces of the puzzle.
Hay was born in February 1894 in Potters Bar in Middlesex. She attended St
Hilda’s College in Oxford from 1913 to 1916. She published three mystery novels
within three years in the 1930s, Murder Underground, Death on the Cherwell and
TheSanta Klaus Murder. Her second novel, Death on the Cherwell, appeared during
the same year as Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers and coincidentally both novels
were set in women’s colleges in Oxford.
After Murder
Underground was published, Dorothy L Sayers wrote a review in the Sunday Times
in 1934, 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.’
Like Dorothy
L Sayers, Mavis attended Oxford before women were allowed to graduate. She was interested
in the industries and handicrafts of rural Britain and, after leaving
university, she was sponsored by the Agricultural Economics Research Institute
of Oxford University to collaborate with Helen Fitzrandolph on a series of
works surveying the rural industries. Mavis was also interested in quilting and
published several books on crafts.
She married
Helen Fitzrandolph’s brother, Archibald Menzies Fitzrandolph, in 1929. He was
killed in a flying accident during World War II. Mavis Doriel Hay died in 1979
at the age of 85.
Eighty years
after it was first published, Murder Underground was republished by British
Library Crime Classics in 2014. In his introduction to the new edition of the novel, crime writer
Stephen Booth said that Mavis Doriel Hay had been ‘unjustifiably overlooked.’
He also bemoaned the fact that her third detective novel, The Santa Klaus Murder, published in
1936, was sadly her last, and wondered whether the approach of World War II was
the reason for this.
I am sure
that lovers of classic crime novels will be glad to have the opportunity to get
to know this author now. I have to admit that I found Murder Underground to be a
slow starter, but I kept in mind the fact that it was Mavis’s first novel.
Alleyn falls in love but he still has to be professional and solve the murder
Artists in Crime was Marsh's sixth novel featuring Roderick Alleyn
Artists in Crime introduces Detective Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn’s love interest for the first time, the painter Agatha Troy. She is reserved, independent and a successful professional artist and Alleyn instantly finds himself falling for her.
The detective first meets Troy when he is returning from a long holiday in New Zealand and boards a ship to Vancouver. As the ship leaves the port of Suva after calling at the Pacific island of Fiji, he sees Troy up on the deck painting the wharf before it fades into the distance.
Alleyn already knows and admires Troy’s work and he has an awkward conversation with her about it. He finds himself drawn to her at once, but she seems unimpressed with him and is offhand.
They next meet when Alleyn is sent to investigate a murder that has occurred at the country house in England she has inherited from her father. He is staying with his mother, who has a house near Troy’s home, before he returns to work after his long absence. His superior officer at Scotland Yard telephones to ask him to start work early to investigate a murder near where he is staying.
When he goes to the house, he again sees Troy, who is still shocked after a woman has been killed in her home in a macabre way. She does not welcome Alleyn and his officers searching the rooms of her guests or keeping them under supervision in her dining room while they embark on their investigation.
Alleyn tries to maintain a professional detachment but finds himself apologising to Troy for the things he must do to investigate the murder. It is only at the end of the novel, when the case has been solved and the murderer arrested, that we see a softening in Troy’s attitude towards him, which gives Alleyn hope for the future
Patrick Malahide (left) played Chief Inspector Alleyn in the 1990 BBC TV adaptation of Artists in Crime
The suspects in the case are all Troy’s students, who pay her ‘substantial fees’ to study under her in the studio she has built in the garden of her home. The victim. Sonia, is an artist’s model, who the students are painting in the nude. She is posing on a bed that has been draped with a silk cloth. Earlier, a dagger has been attached to the underside of the bed and the model is impaled on the point when she takes up her pose for the class.
Troy inherited the house from her father, but he did not leave her much money so she has to earn her own living. However, she is shown living comfortably in the world of the 1930s upper classes in England. She has a well-staffed country home and enjoys living in the Bohemian art world of London, where she stays at a club and has many society friends.
Artists in Crime was televised in 1968 and 1990. It is a well-plotted mystery with a surprising ending and it is interesting for the reader to see Alleyn’s character developing from the way he is portrayed in the earlier books. He is once again ably assisted by his subordinates, Fox and Bailey, and his friend, the journalist Nigel Bathgate.
I did not find the details about methods of painting and artists’ equipment very interesting, but I realise Ngaio would have found it fascinating because she enjoyed painting herself and studied art before becoming an actress and then a crime writer.
First published in 1938, Artists in Crime is the sixth Roderick Alleyn mystery and is well worth reading for the whodunit element of the novel alone. The love interest between Alleyn and Troy is well set up and has immediately made me want to read the next novel in the series, Death in a White Tie, in which Troy appears again.
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.
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.
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.
Novel's fascinating format makes for a compelling and ingenious murder mystery
The Documents in the Case is notable for its experimental format
A bundle of letters and statements can be daunting to sort out in real life, but when a reader is presented with the same challenge at the beginning of a detective novel, they might be put off from even starting to read the story.
However, when the author of the novel happens to be Dorothy L Sayers, I think most readers would probably be prepared to make the effort.
In The Documents in the Case,the sixth detective novel by the author, which was published in 1930, there will be a murder to be solved eventually, and two men will join forces to play detective. But that is about all this story has in common with Dorothy’s other detective novels featuring her aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, who doesn’t appear in this book at all.
The murder victim is not discovered until page 135. By then Dorothy has introduced us to the main protagonists in the story by presenting us with a succession of letters that they have written to other people, which will eventually become part of a bundle of evidence presented to the Director of Public Prosecutions.
We learn a lot from all the letters about the relationship between an older man and his young wife, information that is destined to be sent to Sir Gilbert Pugh, Director of Public Prosecutions, which will ultimately lead to a murder conviction and a hanging.
Robert Eustace, the pen name for Eustace Robert Burton, a doctor and a writer of crime and mystery novels himself, was credited by Dorothy with supplying her with the plot idea for The Documents in the Case and with also giving her the supporting medical and scientific details to use.
The concept for the book was based on the ingenious idea of giving the reader all the evidence that the DPP will trawl through before deciding whether there is a case to answer.
I think Dorothy makes a success of this because she is a superb writer. Some of the letters written by the spinster, Agatha Milsom, who is working as housekeeper to the married couple, Mr and Mrs Harrison, that she sent regularly to her sister, Olive, reminded me of the letters in Jane Austen’s novels, written by characters to each other that help to move the plot forward without every scene having to be played out. Using the multiple viewpoints of the letter writers not only establishes their own characters with the reader, but also reveals their real opinions of the other characters.
My only, very slight criticism of the book is that the scientific evidence put before the reader at the end of the story was lengthy and hard for a non-scientist, such as myself, to understand completely. But I mention this as just the faintest of criticisms because I still persevered and read through it all and I think I just about understood it.
Sayers was given the idea for The Documents in the Case by a doctor friend
The story is essentially about people and their relationships and reveals how people see things very differently. The fact that there is a murder and therefore a whodunit element to the story was a bonus for me. Without it, there wouldn’t have been much incentive to read all the letters and statements!
Pulling out the essential truth about the case from each character’s version of events is a task that falls to the victim’s son, Paul, with the reader going along for the ride. I found The Documents in the Case to be a compelling story and a real page turner and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
It transpires that the victim died as a result of being poisoned by a substance that could either have been administered deliberately, or that they could have consumed it accidentally. It falls to scientific analysis of the poison to prove whether it was administered to the victim deliberately, or whether it could have been present in food naturally, and it is not easy for the pathologist to find out the truth.
Sadly, Dorothy is said to have been disappointed with the way The Documents in the Case turned out and she confessed to wishing she had done better with the brilliant plot she had been given by her doctor and writer friend, Eustace.
In my opinion she did extremely well with it, but it is up to other readers to pronounce their own, final judgments.