Ngaio Marsh's Hand in Glove (#1962Club)

"Here, Nicola, encountered the group of persons with whom, on one hand disastrously and on the other to her greatest joy, she was about to become inextricably involved."

Nicola Maitland-Mayne has just taken a job for P. Pyke Period as a typist. The elderly (and fussy) Mr. Period has been invited to write a book of etiquette, but all his notes are handwritten, and he needs somebody to type and organize them. While she's there working, Period invites her to an impromptu luncheon. 

It's Harold Cattrell who's at that luncheon and is murdered. Who did it? On hand are Cattrell's sister, his sister's ward, called Moppet, and Moppet's dodgy boyfriend, Cattrell's ex-wife with her new husband, the ex-wife's son Andrew by her first (of three) marriages, Nicola, and Period himself. Whew. Got that? The book does provide a chart. Period's servants get a passing consideration because they don't like Cattrell, but we all know it can't be the servants, right?

On the night of an outdoor summer party, Cattrell is lured into a dig for sewer repair, and then a sewer pipe is tipped over on him, crushing him into the mud. Threads from a pair of work gloves are found on the sewer pipe, but now the gloves can't be found.

Somebody hurls a bookend at Period in a second attempt at murder.

Pretty much everybody on that list has some motive to have killed Cattrell--he was an irritable man, it seems--but of course Alleyn, with his crew, discovers the murderer.

Though not her best, still a pretty strong entry in the series, I thought. I find her later ones a bit weaker as a rule, but this was amusing, and the obfuscation worked on me--I'd picked the wrong person for the murderer. I'm not sure it felt like 1962, with servants still around and country houses and books of etiquette and heirs not having access to their money until they turn twenty-five, but there was a nod to the new popular music at least, awful as we're told it is. 😉But it was its 1962-ness that got me to read it now.

Also:

Vintage Mystery, Silver, Glove. Who had the gloves? Is it the dodgy boyfriend? They belonged to him. Is it the third husband? He carried the jacket with them in the pocket for a while. Who, who, who!

And as for that 'greatest joy'? Well, I don't think you'll need much help to guess who among that list of suspects Nicola will be marrying soon...Much easier to figure out than the murderer!