Four Days’ Wonder by A.A. Milne

It feels needlessly flippant to be discussing detective fiction, especially fun detective fiction, at the present moment. But then again, aren’t scholars like me always banging on about how Golden Age crime writing’s importance lies in its wartime context? Those of us not playing any direct role in the conflicts might find at some times, as have so many readers over history, the need to escape, however briefly.
 
I read Four Days’ Wonder (1933) before we heard about the invasion. At that point, I felt the need to escape something else altogether. Having finally succumbed to COVID-19, at the most inconvenient time – a highly stressful fortnight at work, so I absolutely could not take time off – and with a particularly unpleasant drama playing out on the academic side, I needed some literature of escape. I wanted something light, fun, easily readable, and intelligent. At last, I found the perfect book in my study.
 
A.A. Milne (1882-1956) is of course best known as the author of Winnie the Pooh. Every now and then, someone pops out the fact that he also wrote detective fiction. It nearly always follows the format: “Did you know Milne also wrote one detective novel – and it’s a masterpiece?!” They are referring to The Red House Mystery (1922). I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone acknowledge that he wrote at least two detective novels. The other is Four Days’ Wonder. 
 
When I came across Four Days’ Wonder in a charity shop about a year ago, I picked up it and Two People, which were being sold for the combined total of 50p. I picked it up out of interest because I honestly hadn’t known until then that Milne wrote any books for adults beyond Red House. Now, I enjoyed Red House when I read it yonks ago and have always thought it was more a comedy than a mystery – although apparently that’s not the correct opinion. I also knew that the consensus that it was Milne’s only foray into the genre was wrong, because I read his short story “The Rape of the Sherlock” before even reading Red House. Anyway, I was curious, so I turned to the blurbs. While Two People clearly wasn’t going to be a whodunit but did look fun, Four Days’ Wonder looked much more promising.
 
Nonetheless, the books languished in a TBR mountain until the other week. I opened up Four Days’ Wonder and it turned out to be exactly, and I mean exactly, what I needed.
 
Jenny (Jane) Windell is an eighteen-year-old reader of detective fiction who, one day, stumbles across the dead body of her colourful aunt, actress Jane Latour. After inexplicably cleaning what looks like the murder weapon and losing her monogrammed handkerchief at the scene, she flees and decides, with debatable evidence, that she will be the police’s prime suspect.
 
On the run, Jenny enlists her oldest friend to help her forge various new identities, and finds a handsome artist on a farm near Tunbridge Wells who doesn’t seem to care which name she’s currently using and helps her with equal enthusiasm. All of these characters are wonderfully drawn. Their banter is witty, affectionate, and – considering the period – remarkably alive and inoffensive.  I particularly enjoyed the fantasy worlds Jenny and Nancy, her friend, create and inhabit, and their elaborate secret codes and identities. There is an entire secret code explained clearly at one point and I just ended up wishing I had friends with whom I could be that creative.
 
From the cocksure Inspector Marigold to the conveniently shared initial ‘J’ affecting half the characters, the novel gently lampoons many of the traditions of the then-contemporary adventure mystery story. Of course, Arthur Conan Doyle is namechecked, and so too are Freeman Wills Crofts and – with the irreverence that marks this book as firmly middlebrow – Edgar Wallace.
 
While Jenny is the protagonist, having the adventures and ultimately solving the mystery, what happens to her is mostly happenstance. But the characters are all linked by another one: an exquisite creation. Archibald Fenton is a novelist, who is much lauded as a writer, but as a person is absolutely inadequate. Pompous, self-absorbed, under the generally unevidenced belief that he is irresistible to women, and more concerned with his image than his art, every second with him was a pleasure because I knew the author gets it. My work has put me into close contact with a lot of writers, especially crime writers, most of whom are incredibly lovely but there are egos. And I’d better say no more than that.
 
I did not want Four Days’ Wonder to end. But it had to and, at just over 200 pages, its length is just right. The solution to the mystery might disappoint some and, if this were a Freeman Wills Crofts, I would be a bit miffed, but I powered through it brimming with pleasure and satisfaction, and closed the book with a big smile on my face.
 
You probably do need to be a dedicated Golden Age mystery fan to enjoy Four Days’ Wonder. By that, I mean you probably need to be a serious reader, who recognises the habits of writers beyond the big names. This may not be one for casual readers or fans of the genre in other media. 
 
But if you are a hard-reading genre enthusiast whose heart needs lightening, I cannot recommend Four Days’ Wonder enough. A.A. indeed.

Mini reviews #37 - Death on the Nile special

In honour of the newly (and finally) released movie, I thought I’d offer a special double-length set of mini-reviews, dealing with ten incarnations of the classic murder mystery. Others exist but one has to draw the line somewhere!

 

Death on the Nile (1937) by Agatha Christie. An iconic mystery novel for a reason, but not a perfect one, Death on the Nile is a passionate and ingenious tale of love, fame, and the end of opulence. Set aboard a Nile steamer, it concerns a wealthy socialite, famous purely for being beautiful and inheriting her father’s new money, murdered on her honeymoon. The prime suspect Jacqueline de Bellefort, the excellently-drawn ex-best-friend whose fiancée the late Linnet Ridgeway married. But Jacqueline has a very dramatic alibi: she was sedated and monitored after shooting someone else. Hercule Poirot, enjoying ‘the little vacation,’ learns that a holiday is never a holiday and gets to grips with the lengthy list of suspects, all of whom have something to hide. It is escapism at its best, even if some of the logic doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. I’d recommend checking out the relevant episode of the All About Agatha podcast for a breakdown of the plot holes – because, honestly, I never notice them when I’m reading this book: I just enjoy it too much. An unusual feature of Death on the Nile is that every single character – from the great Christie ‘types’ like the snobbish Miss Van Schuyler to the very minor players who never appear in the films like Mr Fanthorpe – is brilliantly and engagingly depicted. You feel like you’ve met them all. And I can’t go without mentioning Mrs. Otterbourne, the tragic bestselling author of slushy romances whose books no one reads and who insists that she’s being censored. She is rather relevant in this day and age. I believe that she is a comic self-portrait; not of Christie as she became but of Christie as she might have become had she kept writing in her original derivative genre. Thank goodness she turned to crime.

 

Murder on the Nile (1944) by Agatha Christie. Christie’s stage adaptation famously replaces Hercule Poirot with a new character, the worldly Canon Pennyfather (is this the same Canon Pennyfather who will go on to play an unwitting role in the odd goings on At Bertram’s Hotel? Probably not, but it’s fun to imagine). Although the author claimed that Poirot as a character was too bombastic for the stage, it’s highly likely that she didn’t like certain actors claiming ownership of the role and therefore of her creation. Francis L. Sullivan, who had played Poirot a couple of times, starred in the first production of Murder on the Nile. The action takes place on the deck of the Lotus (the Karnak in the novel) and the heavily reduced cast of characters contains amalgamations of those in the book. Ultimately, although Christie recognized correctly the dramatic potential of her own work, I’m not sure this is quite the exploitation of that potential that it could be. For a Christie play, the dialogue is surprisingly flat and unfortunately one or two moments have not aged at all well.

 

‘Hercule Poirot: Rendezvous with Death’ (1945), Mutual Radio Broadcasting. Starring Harold Huber, the Hercule Poirot radio series is typical of the craze for such shows on the American radio waves in the 1940s. Only a handful of episodes survive, as far as we know, and ‘Rendezvous with Death’ is a real curio because it’s the only one we have directly based on a published text – although several of the lost ones were. The scriptwriter does a very good job condensing one key element of Christie’s complex plot into less than half an hour. It was first broadcast on 12^th July 1945 and exploits the novel’s drama for its own purposes admirably. There really are so few characters that it’s easy to spot the murderer, so it’s maybe more of a howdunit than a whodunit. But it works. Compared to the lamentably rushed 30-minute episode of Suspense! based on The ABC Murders, it comes out easily on top.

 

Death on the Nile (1978), directed by John Guillermin. Peter Ustinov's first and best outing as the eccentric Belgian detective, with a super-starry supporting cast. The scenery is beautiful, Ustinov is entertaining, with his own spin on the character, and the other players have delicious fun hamming up their roles. I feel like a whole generation of homosexuals needs to be told about this film, in which Angela Lansbury plays a drunk and Bette Davis and Maggie Smith have a waspish double act. [Review originally appeared in ‘Mini reviews #9’ in November 2017]

 

Death on the Nile (1996) by Paul Lamond Games. There are a fair few Agatha Christie jigsaws around, with the following format: read a booklet containing a heavily condensed version of the story, up to the point of ‘whodunit’, assemble a jigsaw containing a visual clue, then check you’ve got the answer right by reading the solution in either a sealed envelope or mirror writing at the back of the booklet. Death on the Nile was one of the first. What is interesting is that, inevitably, the puzzle is reduced to just a couple of scenes and there aren’t really many characters or possibilities – although in my edition (the first, from the 1990s), you’re given a deluxe list of suspects and motives from the novel, most of which don’t appear in the booklet at all! As always, the jigsaw aspect is enjoyable; anyone who knows the story fairly well can guess what the visual clue will be, especially when it becomes clear that the image centres on the victim’s cabin.

 

Death on the Nile (1997), BBC Radio 4. Michael Bakewell’s five-part dramatization is the most faithful to the novel’s intricacies and also – perhaps surprisingly – the best paced.  Its episodic nature means there’s always something interesting happening. John Moffatt plays Poirot true to excellent form, and Enyd Williams directs with customary pleasant lightness. There is a definite mix of acting styles here, from the highly accomplished Donald Sinden and Rosemary Leach, to the enjoyable work of the standard Radio 4 players, to one very questionable performance. The only real cock-up is when Linnet Doyle, who has been speaking with an English accent, is referred to as ‘the American lady’. But, overall, a hugely enjoyable adaptation, as we expect in this fabulous series of BBC radio dramas.

 

Agatha Christie’s Poirot: Death on the Nile (2004), directed by Andy Wilson. I remember the day this was broadcast on ITV – 12^thApril 2004. I was fourteen and very, very, very excited. I was a little disappointed, although I’ve grown to like it more over time. Kevin Elyot’s take on the novel is consciously trying to be different to and darker than the 1978 film, but I’m not convinced that anything really underscores that darkness. It does make the most of the Shakespearean heights of passion, and the futility of love in the story and the direction is really superb. A pre-Hollywood Emily Blunt pops up as the doomed Linnet, and there is sufficient scene stealing from Frances de la Tour. But ultimately the pacing is a problem, with a great deal of action and plot crammed into the last 20 minutes.

 

Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile (2008) by Dreamcatcher. An ‘i-spy’ hidden object game, of the typical format: cheaply made scenes where you click on prescribed items and clues among a lot of clutter. The story unfolds passively. It’s perfectly diverting, exactly like any other game of this kind. There are a few Christies in this series, including 4.50 from Paddington, Peril at End House, and Dead Man’s Folly.

 

Mystery Match Village X Death on the Nile (2021) by Outplay Entertainment. Mystery Match is one of those ubiquitous mobile phone games where you play Candy Crush-style levels between rounds of a hidden-object crime story. By some coup, the developers were able to get permission from Agatha Christie Limited to include a Death on the Nile themed ‘special event’ – that is, a game within the game where you do the same thing on a more basic level (it essentially co-opts their seasonal ‘awards scheme’ where you play special rounds that encourage you to buy virtual bling with real money). Remarkably, they have endeavoured to tell the whole story of Death on the Nile – although their source is clearly the 2004 screen adaptation, not the novel – and the result is perfectly playable but a bit … weird. It really is evidence that Agatha Christie’s genius lay far beyond plotting: while the plot is intact, the characters and dialogue are frankly nauseating.  It all feels cheap and silly and like one of 30-episodes-per-week daytime TV mysteries.

 

Death on the Nile (2022), directed by Kenneth Branagh. Branagh is back in what I suspect will be his last brush with Poirot. I’d like there to be more. But this film has been especially beleaguered, not just by the COVID-19 pandemic but also by some very problematic cast members. However, it’s out now and doing moderately well. I really enjoyed this film, and preferred it to Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express. Unlike in that offering, the starry cast gets fair screen time. While Branagh still takes up more screen time than he would if he wasn’t the director (surely young Poirot in flashbacks should have been played by a younger actor?), he doesn’t hog his scenes. It helps that the first hour is spelt ratchetting up the drama before the first inevitable murder. That is of course a feature of the book, too, which has led to criticism over pacing. However, this film doesn’t fall into the trap that both the 1978 and the 2004 versions did: the pace feels beautifully controlled, and the third murder, which feels superfluous in the older films, makes sense here. Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green have made several changes to the book and this is a much lusher, sexier version of the story. As in the stage version, several characters have been amalgamated and some have been completely rewritten, this time to make it more diverse and glamorous – which I think is a very good thing for a big screen film in 2022. It is not something Agatha Christie would have written. But I think it works. And the audience when I dragged my poor spouse to see it was generally younger than us, which was a first. They came for the stars, and clearly enjoyed it.

 

 

The Bat by Jo Nesbø

 “You’re a tiny bit damaged every time you unravel a murder case”, says Harry Hole in his debut thriller.
“Unfortunately, as a rule there are more human wrecks and sadder stories, and fewer ingenious motives, than you would imagine from reading Agatha Christie.” The worldview presented here is certainly starker and bleaker, with good and bad in a more complex dialogue than in the British school of crime writing.

Norwegian police detective Harry Hole is in Australia to investigate the murder of a young Norwegian woman, who he quickly realises is the victim of a serial killer. The investigation takes him into seedy underworlds and showcases police corruption, racial tensions, and institutional homophobia (although, in the latter case, he shows us his manly heroism by indulging in it).
 
I do not think this book has aged as well as it might have since first publication in 1997. We are meant to admire Hole for fondly remembering homophobic persecution he inflicted on a gay adult as a child and noting that he hadn’t been very nice (he has evolved and is a nice liberal), just a few pages before joining in extensive homophobic police jokes that pretty much result in the one gay character – who is of course wildly attracted to our hero – ending up dead and mutilated.
 
The novel features racism in a very deliberate way, and has some commentary on the dangers of othering, which struck me as similar to the way in which Val McDermid presents transgender issues in The Mermaids Singing, published just two years before The Bat.
 
The most famous critic of the Christie school of crime writing was Raymond Chandler, who sought (how successfully depends on who you ask) to move the crime novel away from artificiality and towards the real world in all its grim, messy reality. Nesbø seems to be following his lead, but his narrative devices, which may enhance the real-world social commentary, present a self-consciously fictional world.
 
At least half the characters have a habit of going off into long and involved stories, each spanning several paragraphs and multiple pages. Sometimes, these are reminiscences which serve as fables from which a clue or psychological point can be extracted. More often, they are bits of history or localised (Australian) legends used as cautionary tales. Everyone is remarkably erudite!
 
I’m not trying to criticise this aspect, because I found these moments among the most engaging. And, honestly, the last thing I expected when settling down with a landmark Norwegian novel was to learn so much about Australian culture and heritage. It’s all told in a pacey, engaging way.

In summary, I enjoyed The Bat, but with some reservations. It is an impressive thriller with an understandable wide appeal, and makes reading more - seeing the character and the series evolve - an extremely attractive proposition.

Dead Dead Girls by Nekesa Afia

“There were so many things in the world she could not solve, but hopefully, she could solve this.”

 
 
This blog has not been my priority in the last few years, for a mix of obvious and less obvious reasons, but I have continued to read widely. Some really cracking crime fiction titles and studies have been published or reprinted this year. Hopefully, at some point in the near future, you’ll get my reviews of 2021 titles like Lori Rader-Day’s Death at Greenway, the reissue of F. Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin to See the Peepshow, and John Goddard’s second volume of Agatha Christie’s Golden Age. Now, though, I wanted to share with you one of my favourite books of 2021.
 
Dead Dead Girls (2021) is a remarkable debut and the first in a series by Nekesa Afia. It is remarkable in its own right, but all the more astonishing when you consider that Afia is 24 and wrote this while studying as an undergraduate. Set in 1920s Harlem, it features Louise Lloyd, a much-needed black queer detective, who will return next year in Harlem Sunset.
 
Louise, who works as a waitress and spends her nights at a speakeasy, is scarred by an incident that took place in her teens. Now, in 1926, black women like her are being abducted and killed, and the world at large seems to be turning a blind eye. When she is apprehended after a drunken brawl, a police detective convinces her to work with him to find the serial killer. Like all the best amateur detectives, her value to the force lies in her access to spaces the white male officers could not hope to  penetrate.
 
From Louise’s tender secret relationship with her girlfriend, Rosa, to squalid boarding house that dancing girls have made a community, and the systematic corruption underscoring every turn of these women’s lives, Afia writes engagingly, eloquently, and evocatively. You really feel like you are experiencing Harlem in 1926. And, with a horrible jolt, you realise how many of the same conversations around race, sex, and class are still extremely relevant today.
 
Before I bought Dead Dead Girls, I read a review online, which I can’t find now, that complained it was nothing special, nothing new. Just a conventional mystery with a new character in the lead. I wonder if that reviewer missed the point somewhat.
 
Hundreds of conventional mysteries are published every year, maybe set in the interwar years and almost always featuring white straight male detectives, with no more than one difference (someone in television once told me, horrifyingly, ‘one difference is edgy, two or more are impossible’ – they were talking about newcomers on television can be people of colour or queer or disabled or over 50 but not any combination, with very few exceptions). Some of these mysteries have strong themes, messages, and senses of place. But think about any ground-breaking, significant, and enduring detective. They all start out comfortably in their series; their presence alone is significant.
 
Sherlock Holmes broke ground as a ‘consulting detective’ given prominence in a crime adventure along already established lines. Miss Marple broke ground as an elderly spinster solving a typically Golden Age complex mystery in her own community. Philip Marlowe broke ground working outside the law and in his own head in a story that had been done a hundred times in print and on screen. Louise Lloyd is a black queer woman of her space and of her time, but no one like her has yet achieved prominence as an investigator in the crime fiction genre. Even without the accessibility and urgency of Afia’s prose, Lloyd’s presence alone is ground-breaking.
 
In sum, Dead Dead Girls is an auspicious start to a series and a career.  It is an immersive read and a mystery that is both entertaining and necessary.

Mini reviews #36

 ‘The Lemesurier Inheritance’ (1923) by Agatha Christie

Christie’s (and Hercule Poirot’s) take on The Hound of the Baskervilles. Like the Sherlock Holmes case, this short story concerns a family curse preventing certain heirs to a baronetcy from living to assume the title. Of course, the solution is different – and more psychologically interesting – and it ends with a very cheeky joke. Highly recommended.

Herewith the Clues! (1939) by Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links

The fourth and final Links/Wheatley crime dossier is extremely dull and boring. See my reviews of Murder Off Miami and Who Killed Robert Prentice? for overviews of the format and more successful examples.  However, it is fund to see photos of Wheatley and his friends, including many peers and famous writers, posing a scallywags of various ilks.

 

The Crocodile Bird (1993) by Ruth Rendell

In this breathtaking novel, young Liza Beck has lived her whole life cloistered away with her mother, Eve, who is intensely attached to their home. When Eve is arrested for murder, Liza goes to live with her secret boyfriend, their gardener, and tells him, Scheherazade-style, stories of Eve’s many crimes. Unable to see her mother, who has killed several men, as a monster, Liza is able to view with fresh eyes the horrors of patriarchy and the brainwashing that comes, not from a sequestered life, but from a mainstream one. This is Rendell at her misanthropic best.

 

Unsolved Case Files: Banks, Jamie (2019)

A wonderfully thoughtful birthday present from Alan, who has many times been forced to hear all about how much I enjoyed the Usborne Mystery Files as a child. This is a similar thing: pieces of evidence presented as a cold case, which you work through to solve. We both enjoyed it thoroughly. Of course it’s very easy to crack, and the storytelling isn’t exactly stellar – but I assume it’s aimed at children, families, or drunk people house-partying. We loved going through newspaper clippings, photographs, and transcripts with a magnifying glass. Perhaps it’s just as well we didn’t discover this series during lockdown – nothing else would have got done!

 

Five Strangers (2021) by E.V. Adamson

There is a strong Patricia Highsmith influence in Andrew Wilson’s first psychological thriller written as E.V. Adamson. We follow Jen, a likeable but oblivious young professional with an unnaturally attentive best friend, who witnesses a murder-suicide in central London. As she starts to appear more and more paranoid, and we learn more about her past, the secrets behind the deaths she witnessed emerge.

The Moor by Laurie R. King

Set in late 1923, The Moor (1998) is the fourth in Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell series. It sees married couple Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes called to Dartmoor, famously the site of The Hound of the Baskervilles, to investigate a murder. In fact, the murder has some echoes of Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1901 novel, as it seems to involve yet another phosphorescent hound.

There have been sitings around the moor of a ghostly luminous carriage, along with a demonic hound. This is a real Dartmoor legend – the story of Lady Howard’s coach – which may well have inspired the Baskerville backstory.

The ghost of Lady Howard is said to ride at night in a coach made of the bones of her dead husbands. There is even a (real) song about it, dating back centuries:
 

My ladye hath a sable coach,

And horses two and four;

My ladye hath a black blood-hound

That runneth on before.

My ladye’s coach hath nodding plumes,

The driver hath no head;

My ladye is an ashen white,

As one that long is dead.

‘Now pray step in, my ladye saith,

‘Now pray step in and ride.’

I thank thee, I had rather walk

Than gather by thy side.

The wheels go round without a sound

Or tramp or turn of wheels;

As cloud at night, in pale moonlight,

Along the carriage steals.

I’d rather walk a hundred miles

And run by night and day

Than have the carriage halt for me

And hear the ladye say:

‘Now pray step in, and make no din,

Step in with me and ride;

There’s room I trow, by me for you,

And all the world beside.’

 
Investigating the legend and the murder, Holmes and Russell end up at Baskerville Hall, speaking to its owner, the last of the Baskerville line, and recalling the events of Holmes’s most famous case. Russell finally learns that the two legends – Howard and Baskerville – are being used by the guilty party to exploit local superstitions.
 
King clearly had fun writing in the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould as a kind of guide to the moor. Baring-Gould (1834-1924) was a real historical figure, author of hundreds of novels, memoirs, and miscellany, including several books on Dartmoor. You can also blame him for 'Onward! Christian Soldiers', and he was the grandfather of William S. Baring-Gould, whose 1962 biography of Sherlock Holmes mingled canon and fancy in a manner that continues to influence how the character is understood.

Mary Russell uses these books to navigate the geography and mythologies surrounding her case, and occasionally meets with the near-nonagenarian who, in reality, died in January 1924, not long after The Moor’s setting.

Russell critiques as she reads, and grows frustrated at Baring-Gould’s wandering mind. Here, King is clearly indulging in literary – and researcher’s – criticism of her own, and the result is entertaining.
 
After finding (and block-quoting) a relevant anecdote from Baring-Gould’s memoirs, Russell reflects:
 

All my nerves tingled […] I knew something [discussed in this passage] was the key. […] I devoured the rest of the book, but again, Baring-Gould had finished playing with that shiny idea and did not return to it, not within those covers. […] I felt like throwing the volume across the room.

 
But herein lies a question. Why doesn’t Russell simply ask her friend, living handily nearby and apparently just waiting to turn up awkwardly at a party? Why does she need to read his published work, rather than just talking to him, and asking follow up questions?
 
Of course, it’s because King is working with the published work, and not with the man – so too, therefore, is Russell. But it kind of begs another question: why include him as a character in the first place?
 
Nonetheless, this is an entertaining, well-told story, I also want to give a final shout out to King’s/Russell’s snark. Who else could write, within just a few paragraphs, that one person ‘did not suffer from brevity of speech, although he [made up for it with] a considerable brevity of both wit and learning’ and another ‘did not seem overly gifted with subtlety of mind’? Fans of the Russell/Holmes series are bound to enjoy The Moor.

The Secret House of Death by Ruth Rendell

Apologies for the longer and more autobiographical post than usual this time.

Ruth Rendell!

 

I didn’t red Ruth Rendell until I was 19. There was a reason for this. Growing up with a fervent devotion to Agatha Christie, I would often come across critiques from other crime writers (these were very fashionable up to the 2000s, and some of the big names now claiming her as their greatest inspiration started out saying she was awful, or pretending they hadn’t even heard of her). Rendell seemed particularly virulent, and I also read that she never planned her novels. So, child-me figured, if she didn’t understand the master and her own books took that little effort to write, I wouldn’t bother reading them.

 

This is of course a childish and petty attitude to take, and alarmingly some Christie enthusiasts who are adults still take it. Obviously, I had no understanding then about the mechanics of writing, and less still did I understand that the Toryistic fan scholarship I was reading took extra efforts to make Rendell look bad or jealous because she was a left-wing peer. It never occurred to me that P.D. James, for example, said worse, less-informed things about Christie, and managed to share a fan-base – because she was a Tory.

 

I had a few of Rendell’s books lying around from an early age. When I got my first serious romantic partner, who was a big fan of hers, I gifted him a copy of The Rottweiler I’d had since I was fourteen (it was a signed first edition). Before wrapping it up – wrapping up gifts is something that should always be done – I flicked through the first chapter and ended up reading the whole thing in a night. I was annoyed with myself that I loved it, and confused when I went online and read that it was considered one of her worst.

 

A few months later, our wonderful, incredible, fantastic university lecturer Dr Sally West made us read A Dark-Adapted Eye, Rendell’s most famous work as Barbara Vine, which left me speechless. It’s a haunting and bitterly true psychological novel. I went straight to a library and found A Judgement in Stone, the first line of which has been widely quoted in crime fiction studies, and at that point I grew up. I was a fan, and there was no use denying it.

 

Since I seem to have forgotten that this is a review blog, here is another diversion. The University of Chester, where I was an undergraduate, gave me the kind of social education, woven into academic betterment, that is not managed elsewhere. My two departments, Theology & Religious Studies and English, were communities and the staff’s accessibility was a vital part of that. I’ve named Sally West specifically but each lecturer there was a vital part of my personal and professional growth. I’ve been angered to hear about the threats of redundancies in these departments, and the cruel ways these threats are being communicated. For more information, follow the hashtag #NoRedundanciesChester and the University of Chester UCU on social media.

 

On to The Secret House of Death (1968). How I got hold of this book is a long story, the full details of which make it one for a tell-all memoir rather than fodder for a blog post. The short version is that some years ago I had to write a magazine article, under a famous name, about books. The credited author gave me notes including one to the effect that The Secret House of Death contains one of the greatest twists of any novel ever. I dutifully wrote the piece and then bought all the books they/I had recommended because they all sounded so good. I read two, which I thought were awful, and forgot about it, so the rest gathered dust.

 

Fast-forward to April 2021 and I’d just submitted a monstrously long manuscript on Christie which had occupied my every waking (and sleeping) non-day-job hour for some time. I saw The Secret House of Death with its silly Shakespearean title, remembered the warm words I’d had for its twist, and dug in.

 

First things first. There is no twist. Unless you count the revelation that you’ve been seeing things in the wrong light – surely the bare minimum for good crime fiction – as a twist. It is a straightforward, but excellent, psychological mystery. It’s clued, it’s solvable, it’s surprising, and it’s insightful. It does not contain the greatest twist in literature. It does not contain the greatest twist in crime fiction. It does not even contain the greatest twist in Rendell. Check out her short stories for superb examples of what I call the ‘double twist’: the twist you’re kind of expecting followed by an absolute blind-sider, often in the last line.

 

There is a 1980s TV adaptation, which I haven’t seen, and that may well be twisty. The blurb for that sounds more like a domestic noir type thing – think Love from a Stranger – so maybe that’s what this famous person was thinking of. It’s a good reminder that a lot of people who recommend books in magazines etc. haven’t read them and have at best seen the adaptations.

 

But this is about the book. Our main protagonist is Susan Townsend (not Sue Townsend – nowhere near as humorous for one thing). A recently-divorced mother, she tries to keep herself to herself and doesn’t get involved in gossip about the affair going on between her neighbour Louise and Bernard, a handyman/salesman. One day, Susan is forced into the midst of things when she discovers Louise and Bernard in bed together. They are fully clothed but also fully dead. It looks like murder-suicide.

 

The police are not convinced but the narrative oscillates between efforts to unravel what really happened and Susan’s emotional reaction to the scene. She soon becomes close to Bob, Louise’s widower, who asks her to burn Bernard’s romantic letters, which he’s recovered.

 

Since it’s obvious to any crime fiction reader by now that something’s up, I don’t need to tell you to be suspicious of letters which begin ‘My dearest one’ and never mention specific names.

 

Rendell here is on absolutely top form, getting into the sprawling absurdity of human psychology beneath polite interactions. A traumatic event like a murder-suicide makes polite small talk both necessary – for continuity – and impossible, and Rendell captures this brilliantly:

 

‘Were you busy? Am I interrupting something?’

 

‘Of course not.’ His loss made him different from other men, a. pariah, someone you had to treat warily, yet appear to be no different. She wanted to behave both as if the tragedy had never happened and at the same time as if he were deserving of the most solicitous consideration. An odd reflection came to her, that it was impossible to feel much pity for anyone a good-looking as bob. […] If the tragedy hadn’t happened and he had called her like this, she would have felt ill-at ease alone with him.

 

A fantastically complex but concise look at the bizarre, ridiculous mental leaps behind three words.

 

Sometimes, though, Rendell goes a bit O.T.T., tries too hard:

 

‘Well?’ It could be a warm word, a word denoting health or things excellently done, but she made it the coldest in the world. On her lips it was onomatopoeic, a well indeed, a place of deep, dark and icy waters.

 

I don’t know. I think, ‘“Well?” she said coldly’ would have done.

 

The language is more dated that you might expect. Although sixties slang, the kind that Christie or James would never have entertained, is peppered throughout, a rough bartender still cries ‘good gracious!’ and Susan feels sorry for women in their forties because they don’t get catcalled by builders as much as teenaged girls do. Rendell was writing impossibly old-fashioned prose by the 1990s and her fiction has always been fundamentally, though self-awarely, middle class.

 

However, isolating this last incident belies the social commentary in the novel. When read in its totality, and accepting that being the protagonist does not make Susan automatically right or virtuous (Rendell takes ‘think the worst about everyone’ to extremes), the book’s message is a profound one about how ready we are to blame women for men’s shortcomings. How easily we believe narratives about women’s disgrace. How willingly we let men manipulate us and what we see.

 

In homage to child-me, I feel the need to point out, cheekily, that when The Secret House of Death was published, another novel, featuring a similar solution with identical moral commentary, was hiding in a vault to be published after it’s author’s death. That book was Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie.