Six Feet Under

Yes, my dear readers, you all know it by now. Miss Lemon loves to grouse about Inspector Thanet. Reading Six Feet Under (1982), by Dorothy Simpson, has done little to change that proclivity.

Stuffy and self-satisfied, the Inspector could rival M. Poirot, were it only that he had a sense of humour.

But the poor man in trying.

Now that his partner, DC Mike Lineham, is about to enter the matrimonial state (the only state, by the way, that Luke Thanet thinks fit to live in, so it's high time), he turns his moral apprehensions homeward. 

And my, does Inspector Thanet find something to fret about: His wife Joan is thinking of ... how could she? ... joining the workforce. Life, Thanet predicts, will never be as sweet, harmonious, or comfortable as it is with Joan waiting for him quietly at home.

While he gnashes his teeth over this familial conundrum, a more serious domestic drama unfolds in the bucolic village of Nettleton. Carrie Birch, an introverted spinster devoted to the care of her invalid mother, is found murdered.

Who would want to harm a woman so drab and selfless as Carrie?

As Thanet and Lineham go digging, they turn up plenty of dirt, as it were, on Carrie and the few villagers she lived among.

Miss Lemon doesn't feel as though she's giving much away if she says that Thanet is wise and decent enough to see from the business in Nettleton that a stranglehold put on a loved one is no way to ensure that love is returned.

As Miss Lemon said, he is trying. Despite Inspector Thanet's irritating ways, this is a smartly plotted and psychologically insightful mystery.  Well worth the read.

The Night She Died

The Night She Died (1981) is the first in Dorothy Simpson's Inspector Luke Thanet series, and Miss Lemon is afraid that it is not her best.

It's not that the premise fails to intrigue. Quite the opposite. In The Night She Died, a young woman named Julie Holmes is found stabbed in the foyer of her home. The only fingerprints on the knife are Julie's.

Even the briefest enquiries produce a long list of suspects. From her husband, who discovered her body within minutes of her death, to a woman who once knew Julie's now-dead mother. What the enquiries don't produce is much certainty about the dead woman's private life. Thanet knows she had a jealous ex-boyfriend, who is a presenter for the BBC. She also had a boss, who seemed to be harassing her. What he can't account for is where exactly all of these people were on the night Julie Holmes died.

All of this is terribly interesting to Miss Lemon. So perhaps the problem is that this novel suffers from the first-timer writer's compulsion to trust too little in the reader and to tell too much.

The painstaking description of Thanet's every inner thought she found especially tedious. And in his relationship with the less experienced DS Mike Lineham, Thanet is depicted as being both priggish and condescending.

None of this, however, was so annoying that Miss Lemon couldn't get to the part where she learns whodunit.

Lest her dear readers give Mrs. Simpson a miss entirely, Miss Lemon suggests that they start with Close Her Eyes, where Thanet is less tiresome and the pacing is at perfect pitch. Or perhaps an even later entry. For a full bibliography of the Inspector Thanet series, one need only consult this handy list on Fantastic Fiction.

Ah, the joys of Internet communication. Miss Lemon feels very modern.

Close Her Eyes

Miss Lemon wonders if her readers ever feel the same sense of privation that she sometimes feels after finishing a particularly good whodunit.

Such was the case when she turned the last page of Close Her Eyes, an especially absorbing mystery from the pen of Dorothy Simpson, first published in 1984.

Although the murder was solved and all the fraying ends that emerged during the investigation neatly nipped, Miss Lemon hoped the story would continue. She enjoyed it that much.

The work of Mrs. Simpson is new to Miss Lemon, who picked up this entry (number four in the series featuring Inspector Luke Thanet) at a second-hand bookshop only the week before last. And please let her say that the $1 given over for the purpose (yes, Miss Lemon confesses to occasionally purchasing books from the other side of the Atlantic) was worth every cent.

Although editors, publishers, librarians and other such people who like to organize, classify and label literary works would probably call this novel a police procedural, Miss Lemon found herself particularly taken by the psychological explorations of victim, criminal and investigator. She suspects that if her readers like the work of Ruth Rendell, then they will also like that of Mrs. Simpson.

In Close Her Eyes, the author elegantly illustrates that too often, man is the author of his own torment and unhappiness. The mystery here centers on the death of Charity Pritchard, the unlucky daughter to a martinet father and passive and ineffectual mother -- and all of the family members of a fanatical religious sect called The Children of Jerusalem.

Needless to say, Inspector Thanet's investigations turn up behavior on almost every character's part that many would consider less than Christian. At the same time, the Inspector tries to exorcise a demon of his own.

What Miss Lemon likes best about the Inspector's cerebral approach to crime solving is his careful analysis when it comes to questioning suspects and witnesses. He not only calculates how and what he'll ask before he asks it, but also tabulates the response or lackthereof with a facility and precision not seen in even his most luminescent literary forebears -- Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Monsieur Hercule Poirot included.

Fortunately, Miss Lemon had the foresight to snap up two other works by Dorothy Simpson during her recent acquisitions spree. She'll be reading Last Seen Alive (1985) and Element of Doubt (1987) and reporting back to her readers shortly.