Patricia Wentworth's Who Pays the Piper? (Mystery, DeanStreetDecember)

"I always get what I want," said Lucas Dale.

That's the opening line of Who Pays the Piper? and it's Lucas Dale who ends up dead. He didn't get what he wanted that time! (And ever is such hubris rewarded?)

Lucas Dale is a Brit who went to the U.S. and made a pile of money, in likely dodgy ways, and returned to England. He's just bought King's Bourne, an old country manor from the nearly bankrupt estate of James Bourne. Bourne is survived by one of his twin sisters, Millicent O'Hara, Mrs. O'Hara's daughter Catherine and Catherine's cousin Susan Lenox. 

Dale falls in love with Susan Lenox--she's one of the things he wants--but she's already in love with Bill Carrick, the son of the local doctor, who's still got his way to make (as an architect).

Dale also comes with a private secretary, an ex-wife who's on the stage, and an American business partner with a grievance. Plenty of suspects, especially after Dale starts using strong-arm tactics to get Susan to marry him.

Some pearls appear to be stolen, then reappear where they're not supposed to be, and then Lucas Dale is found dead, shot in the back of his head. Scotland Yard is called in, in the person of Chief Inspector Lamb, who brings along his dashing sergeant, Frank Abbott.

Now if you know anything about Patricia Wentworth, you'll know the evidence will look bad for Susan and Bill at first, but that it won't be either of them who committed the murder. And it's not.

This is the second (1940) of the Ernest Lamb series, and he's fine form here, curmudgeonly, sexist, and tender:

"He had three daughters of his own, and was sometimes put to it to conceal a most obstinate softness of heart where girls were concerned."

but at the same time quite observant. Later, after Lamb and Abbott are absorbed into Wentworth's most famous detective series, that of Miss Silver, his curmudgeonly is played up, and his observational skills are less used, and he's mostly that useful thing for a PI, a friend on the force, but in this one he and Abbott are on top of all the needed clues. A completely enjoyable entry, though the witness who has the one crucial clue keeps silent until the very end for reasons that seem a little improbable. (Other than the needs of a mystery novel...)

The first Ernest Lamb novel on the blog is here. I've also got the third and final one, Pursuit of a Parcel, as an eBook, and hope to read it this month. 

It's Dean Street December, and Liz is hosting an event.

Also, though I'm already a bit over the top on this challenge, it also fits My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt:

Vintage Mystery, Gold, Hat. Those are some stylish hats, even if I'm not quite sure who the people under them are. Bill and Susan, I guess, though Susan is supposed to be blonde.

Patricia Wentworth's The Blind Side (#DeanStreetDecember)

"Oh, I wish Ross was dead!" - Chapter 2

"I won't let Ross so much as cross the threshold. If he tries...There'll be murder done." - Chapter 3

"Mr. Ross, he'll go too far one of these days." - Chapter 4

"Shooting's too good for him--that's what I say!" - Chapter 5

Guess who ends up dead? Shot, in fact?

Ross Craddock has just inherited a block of London flats as well as some other property, so he's well-to-do. He inhabits one of those flats; Lucy, a maiden aunt another. A second maiden aunt recently dead inhabited a third flat. There are a dozen altogether, some unoccupied at the time of Ross Craddock's murder.

Ross is just about to evict Lucy; has just tried to seduce Mavis, a distant cousin; has feuded with Rush, the concierge, accusing him of blackmail. (Rush is important in determining just who can have gotten in and out of this locked-building mystery.) 

Chapter 1 gives a family history, which is important, but so complicated as to be incomprehensible; fortunately Wentworth gives us a table later on. Should you like a romance in your Golden Age mystery (as I do!) there's one on between Lee Stratton and Peter Renshaw (also distant cousins).

Whew!

The mystery came out in 1939. World War I is important, but it's before World War II and no sign of it yet. The economy has begun to recover after the depression.

This is the first of the Chief Inspect Ernest Lamb mysteries; Frank Abbott is his public-school-educated assistant. Wentworth wrote three mysteries with Lamb as the main detective before he was absorbed into her most famous series, which has Miss Silver, former governess, as a professional detective. Two Miss Silver mysteries had appeared before this, but without Lamb or Abbott. I find the Miss Silver series pretty wonderful.

Lamb is much the same as he is in the Miss Silver stories, curmudgeonly, and a bit sexist: "Difficult to stop girls doing it nowadays, but if he found one of his [own daughters] with her mouth made up to look like an orange peel..." Dum, dum, de dum. Abbott is more modern, amenable to women in roles they didn't use to have and admires Miss Silver as a P.I. But Lamb isn't a fool in this or in other books; he recognizes Miss Silver gets results when they're paired together; and he finds the murderer in this one, mostly on his own. (Though with a little help.) Very entertaining.

And that romance? Well, if you've read any Patricia Wentworth, you'll know what happens.

All the non-Miss Silver mysteries were reissued be Dean Street Press a few years ago. And since Liz is hosting a Dean Street Press event at the moment...

Patricia Wentworth's Dead or Alive

Liz at Adventures in Reading is hosting a Dean Street December event. The idea is to read books from Dean Street Press, who republish vintage mysteries. They have a few other categories of books, notably their Furrowed Middlebrow line, but it's going to be the mysteries I will read. (I'm pretty sure.) 

I'm a huge fan of Patricia Wentworth's mysteries: her best-known detective is Miss Silver, a former governess who hung out her shingle as a private detective after she retired. But that's not all Wentworth (1877-1961) wrote, and Dean Street has published all her non-Miss Silver mysteries. I've read a few of those, but this challenge was a good excuse to read another.

Dead or Alive (1936) is the first of two Colonel Frank Garrett mysteries. The Colonel is head of Intelligence for the Foreign Affairs office, but his main function in this is to snark at the people who are actually involved in the case and then in the end to appear (he actually tells us) as the 'deus ex machina.' Except even then he doesn't make a very good deus... (but no spoilers!)

The main characters are Meg O'Hara and Bill Coverdale. Bill was interested in Meg even when they were teenagers, but then Meg married Robin O'Hara, dashing, but not, as it turned out, good husband material. Bill has just returned from several years working abroad in Chile, where he went after Meg married Robin. Robin also worked in Intelligence and had discovered something damning about the Vulture's gang. The Vulture ends up in jail, but Robin ends up dead, or so the report is at the start of the novel. 

But! Somebody keeps hinting Robin's alive. Meg gets a letter saying Robin's alive. Somebody slips into her apartment--only she and Robin had keys--and leaves a message suggesting he's alive. So is Robin 'Dead or Alive'? A body was found, but it had been rolling around in the water for a while, and the identification is likely, but not certain. What to do? Meg always liked Bill, but if her husband's still alive...

This is more thriller than mystery (a thing Patricia Wentworth sometimes does) and the outlines of the solution were pretty clear from early on. For a while I was rather annoyed with Meg, who seemed a bit dither-y. There's nothing worse than a character who makes unnecessary mistakes and then using that as the source of tension. Later it got better, and Bill and Meg's escape from the bad guys at the end was pretty thrilling, and I enjoyed it well enough. Still, while I highly recommend Patricia Wentworth, this is definitely not the one to start with. I don't usually do stars, but this would be 2 out of 5 for me.

In general I've had good luck with Dean Street Press and some others made it on to the blog:

Patricia Wentworth:

Touch and Go - again more thriller than mystery, but I quite enjoyed this one. Non-series.

E. R. Punshon's Bobby Owen mysteries:

Diabolic Candelabra - set early in WWII. I liked this one a lot.

Music Tells All - early post-war. I liked this, but not as well as Diabolic Candelabra.

Winifred Peck (Penelope Fitzgerald's aunt! Ronald Knox's brother!):

The Warrielaw Jewel - (1933) a wacky family murder mystery.

I've got a couple of other unread Dean Street Press eBooks. I'll try to read another one this month.

Thanks to Liz for organizing this.

E. R. Punshon's Music Tells All: A Bobby Owen Mystery

Music Tells All (1948) is the 24th out of 35 entries in the Bobby Owen mystery series of E. R. Punshon and only the second one I've read so I'm a relative novice here. In it he teams up with one of Punshon's other detectives, the gloomy Superintendent Bell.

The Dean Street Press eBook edition that I read comes with an introduction by the mystery blogging world's Curtis Evans of The Passing Tramp.

The setup in this one is wonderful. There's what looks very much like a gift horse--a cottage in the countryside at a reasonable rent for Bobby Owen and his wife Olive--and Bobby Owen can't help but keep looking in its mouth. That horse has got two questionable teeth: it seems to be the headquarters--or is it?--of a 'smash and grab' gang operating in London, and then there's some sort of odd Gothic set of love--or is it?--relationships going on among the village's residents. Mr. Fielding is in love with Miss Bellamy, but Miss Bellamy won't talk to anybody, but merely plays the piano, moodily and brilliantly. Miss Rogers is in love with Mr. Fielding's chauffeur, Fred Biggs, but he's in love--or is he?--with Miss Bellamy. And then there's the great question of where all this good food is coming from: it's 1948 and rationing is still on.

The middle, though, I didn't find as strong. It's pretty clear who the murderer is going to be, and it doesn't help when Owen and Bell say it could be person X or it could person Y, all the time conspicuously not suspecting the actual murderer Z. Also a fair amount depends on the psychology of Miss Bellamy, with much portent being laid on her piano playing, and I'm afraid that level of psychological complexity is just a bit above Punshon's pay grade. So on the whole I didn't like it quite as well as the first one I read.

Still the final reveal is well-done and I'll be reading others in the series.

Vintage Mystery Challenge. Golden Age. Who. Crime-solving duo. A mashup of Punshon policemen.

Winifred Peck's The Warrielaw Jewel

The Warrielaw Jewel is a family heirloom for the Warrielaws. As legend has it, a Warrielaw in the distant past married a fairy princess, and the dowry that princess brought was the jewel. And ever since, it's been a curse and a source of contention.

Or maybe the Warrielaw family just likes to quarrel. There are two unmarried sisters of the oldest generation, and three cousins of the next, and none of them get along with any of the others. What to do with the jewel, whether to sell it or keep it, is one of the main points of contention, with the oldest, Jessica Warrielaw, for selling and the rest for keeping.

The novel is narrated by a young Englishwoman who has just married a Scottish lawyer and moved to his hometown of Edinburgh. He's the lawyer for the family, which motivates their involvement, but in addition to being the narrator, she's a key witness to the events on the day of the murder of Jessica Warrielaw.

This novel (1933) is the earlier of Winifred Peck's two detective novels, but she was a prolific novelist in a literary family. One of her brothers was the editor of Punch; another was Msgr. Ronald Knox, he of the ten commandments of detective fiction writing. You'll be pleased to know none of those commandments were violated in The Warrielaw Jewel. Her niece was the wonderful novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, who wrote a collective biography of her father and her uncles, The Knox Brothers, in which her aunt Winifred features much less than she deserves.

But while this novel was perfectly enjoyable, it was not, I would say, one of the greats. It definitely intends to be play by the rules of Golden Age detective fiction, and it even includes a challenge to the reader. As is usual with me, I knew perfectly well who the murderer was by then, but not for the right reasons: rather I knew because of the tone with which the author wrote about the suspects. Explaining the mechanism dragged on a bit.

There isn't a scene of ballroom dancers anywhere in the novel, so I'm not really sure what the cover has to do with the novel. Oh, well. There is certainly jewelry on the dancers, and this is The Warrielaw Jewel, so that's what I'll count it for my challenge list.

Golden Age. Jewelry. My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt.

Patricia Wentworth's Touch And Go

I'm a great fan of Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver mysteries, but this is the first of her novels I've read out of that series. Touch And Go came out originally in 1934, and has recently been reissued, together with all her other non-Miss Silver mystery novels, by Dean Street Press. The introduction is by Curtis Evans of The Passing Tramp.

As the novel begins, Sarah Trent is being interviewed for the position of companion to Lucilla Hildred. Lucilla is 17; her mother and step-father have just died in auto accident, and she's been left to two aging guardians, her great aunt Marina Hildred and her (I think) great uncle Geoffrey Hildred. It's Marina Hildred who is conducting the interview.

Marina Hildred is a bit of a ditherer, and she's constantly nattering on about family relationships. Those relationships are intricate and important, and that's one way you know you're in a Patricia Wentworth novel. The other is that Wentworth writes wonderfully, both amusingly and believably, about maiden aunts, and Marina Hildred is no exception. By the end of the interview, Sarah Trent is pretty sure she's got the job pending a second interview with Geoffrey Hildred, we've got a basic grounding in the family history, and I, at least, was hooked.

One, possibly more, of Marina Hildred's nephews died in World War I. Those nephews include Lucilla's father.

As Sarah Trent is driving away from the Hildred estate, she nearly runs over Lucilla, the first (that we see) of several dangerous, near-fatal accidents that occur to Lucilla. There were and will be others.

[Slight spoiler follows.]

But this is more a sensation novel than a murder mystery. Think Wilkie Collins' The Woman In White, with Lucilla in the Laura Fairlie role. In the end, none of the deaths we learn about were actually murders, but like The Woman In White there's plenty of suspense in the attempt to take advantage of a young woman who will be an heiress. But in the end our Count Fosco is revealed; a couple of marriages are impending; and John Brown turns out to be a name made up (are you surprised?) by a previously missing Hildred.

I found this to be equally as good as the best of the Miss Silver mysteries. I'd recommend it highly.

I suppose that's supposed to be Sarah Trent on the cover. "A decided brunette," according to Marina Hildred. But I'll count this for the category Glove.

Golden Age. Glove. My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt.

E. R. Punshon's Diabolic Candelabra

It was Curtis Evans' blog The Passing Tramp that let me know of the existence of E. R. Punshon, and even of Dean Street Press, the publisher that has recently reissued all his Bobby Owen mysteries. And it was the fact that Dean Street Press occasionally makes one of their books available as a free Kindle eBook that resulted in it arriving on my Kindle.

A series of very happy accidents.

Bobby Owen is, we are told in the opening paragraph, the "head of the somewhat scanty Wychshire C.I.D." and the "secretary to the chief constable, Colonel Glynne." More immediately in this novel, he's the husband to his wife Olive, who has just two remaining of a sample of "heavenly" chocolates. They're sold at a local shop, a friend of Olive's wants to offer them at the church bazaar, and she needs to find the source with the help of her policeman husband. They've got a name, Floyd, and Bobby Owen has a notion who this might be. Miss Floyd "lives in a lonely sort of cottage near Barsley Forest village, but right in the forest." The main events of the plot take place in that forest.

The year the novel comes out is 1942, but the war is only lightly present. As a policeman, Bobby Owen has an extra petrol allotment that allows him to drive off to the forest. There are blackouts and air wardens. But the novel mostly takes place an amusingly fantastical landscape. There's the cottage right in the forest. There's a hermit named Peter. There's a wild child named Loo, and they've sent a truancy officer after her:

"What happened?" Olive asked, passing over the deplorable incident of the nettles. "I mean, about the school?"

"A lady came," Mary answered. "She had very big boots with square toes, and she made you think she was always saying you mustn't. Loo went into the garden, and the lady followed her, and we told her not to, the lady, I mean, but she wouldn't listen, and Loo went out of the garden, and the lady followed, and I told her not to, and she said to hold my tongue, and I did, and Loo went into the forest, and the lady followed, and next morning I had to go to the village to ask them to send to look for her because she hadn't come back, and we still had her bag full of papers."

"What about Loo?" Bobby asked, interested.

"Oh, we didn't much mind about Loo," Mary explained. "She sleeps in a tree or somewhere and then she comes home when she is ready. It was the lady we were worried about, because we didn't think she would really like sleeping in a tree."

"One never knows," murmured Bobby, "but perhaps not."

This is rather representative of the genial tone of the book.

It's the hermit Peter who has the recipe to the mystery ingredient that makes the chocolates so good, and it's Peter who disappears, making this (possibly) a police matter.

A second disappearance of a local shopkeeper makes it definitely a police matter, but who, if anybody, is actually dead isn't resolved until quite late in the book. There's also a local manor house owned by the Rawdon family. There's also a search on for several family heirlooms of the Rawdon family, lost fifty years before: two El Greco paintings, and the diabolic candelabra of the title, a work in silver by Bellini.

The lightness and the amused tone of the writing worked for me. The only real problem was that there were really at least one too many McGuffins: the El Greco paintings could certainly have been dispensed with, and I'm not really sure even the Diabolic Candelabra was actually necessary.

But it was a successful promotion by Dean Street Press as far as I was concerned. The first one was free and now I'm hooked: I'll be reading other Bobby Owen mysteries.

Golden Age. Policeman Bobby Owen. My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery Scavenger's Hunt.