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.

Patricia Wentworth's Eternity Ring

Eternity Ring is a Miss Silver mystery by Patricia Wentworth that came out in 1950. That's about the middle of the Miss Silver series and the characters are well-established. Wentworth is a pro and it shows.

A while back I saw a blog post--I forget where now--in which the author had read a couple of Miss Silver mysteries with indifferent results, and wondered if she/he had been reading the right ones. I thought I should have an answer to the question since I've read a bunch, but didn't. When I started this one, I thought this is the one. This is where to start. But then I decided maybe not. Still it's pretty good.

For those not in the know, Miss Silver is a former governess who has become a professional detective, though a good number of her cases come through personal acquaintance, rather than professional engagement. She has a friend in Scotland Yard--convenient for any English detective--hers is named Frank Abbott and it's he who brings her into this case. Abbott admires Miss Silver and her quiet way of detecting; his boss, Chief Inspector Lamb, is less certain, and a bit of an old stick about women in professional roles, and tends to bluster, but even he has to admit Miss Silver gets results.

The characters are the strongest aspect of this novel. Abbott, Lamb, Miss Silver herself are all handled well and amusingly. Wentworth is a good hand at sketching characters and the various suspects and victims are also well-drawn in this one.

The plot, though, was less successful. A French woman had all her wealth (in diamonds) stolen by an English soldier during the fall of France in 1940; after the war she comes to England to find the culprit. She succeeds, only to become the first victim. A second woman saw something, deduces who the murderer must have been, and she's also killed for her pains. So far, so good. But...

[Spoiler-y]

...the main problem is this: there are three possible suspects. But one of them is the romantic lead, and Patricia Wentworth is not the writer to have her romantic lead also be the killer. A second suspect is a chauffeur, and we all know that Golden Age detective novels can't have a servant as the killer. In any case he's too louche to be the killer; it would simply be too satisfying if he did it. So from quite early on, it's obvious who the actual murderer was.

Also Wentworth violates Chekhov's rule about the gun: a gun over the fireplace in the first act must be fired in the third. The novel starts with a woman who listens in on the party line phone, but she never learns anything during the course of the novel. The whole way through I expected her to be the second or the third victim, and when I got to the end and she wasn't, I felt cheated.

[End spoiler-y]

Needless to say, Miss Silver solves it, with a touch of suspense at the end. It was fun, but I'm still deciding which Miss Silver novel I would recommend as a place to start.

Vintage Mystery Challenge. Gold. Where. Set in a small village. Half the mysteries I read could probably qualify for that category, but might as well use it!

Book Beginning: Patricia Wentworth's Eternity Ring

Maggie Bell stretched out a hand and picked up the telephone. It was a thin, bony hand with jutting knuckles and it moved with a jerk. Maggie did everything in jerks. She was twenty-nine years old, but she had not grown or developed very much since she had had what was always alluded to with some family pride as her "accident." A car had knocked her down in the village street when she was twelve.

...is the beginning of Patricia Wentworth's Eternity Ring. (1950)

Patricia Wentworth writes well about spinsters or those that are doomed to become them. Nowadays such a character would be treated differently, of course. In fact, it's likely enough Maggie will be either the murderer or the victim. This is a terrible generalization, but I feel like I've read enough Miss Silver mysteries to get away with it; I was briefly worried I was about to finish the whole series, but I see there's still a couple I haven't read. Whew.

Anyway, I liked the opening, but I was prepared to like it.

From page 2, a bonus quote:

Miss Cicely brought her real nice books, and not the improving kind neither. Maggie had a sharp eye for being improved, and an impenetrable armor against it.

That makes Maggie seem much more likeable, at least to me...

Book Beginnings on Fridays is a bookish meme hosted by Gilion at Rose City Reader. To play, quote the beginning of the book you're currently reading, give the author and title, and any thoughts if you like. It's snowing here in Toronto. Good day to curl up with a mystery!

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.