Miss Lemon's Mystery Roundup, 2011

Aside from a fragrant cup of Earl Grey, there is almost nothing Miss Lemon likes more than tucking in to a delicious mystery. The more British that mystery, the better.

Miss Lemon had many quiet moments to pause and reflect on these small quirks of inclination. So as the year 2011 draws to a close, she leaves her readers with just a few of her very favourites -- for their own reading and ruminating pleasure:

1. The Blackheath Poisonings (1978), by Julian Symons. In this Victorian-styled mystery, the twisted branches of the Mortimer family bear strange fruit indeed. Readers will find no shortage of suspense and sensation in this case of poisoning that is teased out in a cache of letters. 

2.  The Documents in the Case (1930), by Dorothy L. Sayers. Speaking of epistolary accounts of poisonings, one doesn't have to search too far to find a Golden-Age model for Symons' excellent mystery.

3.  Three Blind Mice (1947), by Agatha Christie. While it is difficult to choose just one work by Agatha Christie as a favourite, Miss Lemon likes this one for its well-drawn set. When the snow begins to fall outside, this is just the book to have by your side.

4. Master of the Moor (1982), by Ruth Rendell. Having made quite a name for herself as doyenne of the psychological novel, there is no book that better shows off Ruth Rendell's virtuosity than this moody mystery. If you've not yet read it, delay no longer!

5. Lonelyheart 4122 (1967),  by Colin Watson. One might think twice about trolling the lonelyhearts column for love after reading this satirically delicious romp through Flaxborough with the delightfully devilish Miss Teatime. It saddens Miss Lemon that Colin Watson is a mystery novelist largely forgotten today.

Here's to reading many more excellent mysteries in 2012!

Forgotten Book Friday: The Blackheath Poisonings

Like a child who has mastered a new game, Miss Lemon has now officially gotten the hang of 'Forgotten Book Friday.' If she seems to be able to think of nothing else for her blog, please accept her sincerest apologies as she offers this week's selection: The Blackheath Poisonings (1978), by Julian Symons.

In a word, it's unputdownable.

All right. That may be more than one word squashed together, but you see Miss Lemon's point.

Subtitled 'A Victorian Murder Mystery,' Mr. Symons delivers what he promises. The prose is so polished, the dialogue so convincing, the plot so positively Victorian in its intricacies and double meanings, that Miss Lemon had to double-check Mr. Symons's vital statistics to be sure that he was not a product of the Victorian era.

Born in 1912 and deceased in 1994, he is not. A lifelong poet and novelist (Mr. Symons left school at age 14), he succeeded Agatha Christie as president of England's Detection Club in 1976, holding the post for almost a decade.

The Blackheath Poisonings is an excellent example of the Golden-Age influence on Mr. Symons. The story centers on the last twisted branches of the Mortimer family tree. The descendants have set up their strange houses in Blackheath, then a bucolic retreat some short distance from London.

When Roger Vandervent, husband of docile Beatrice, dies suddenly of 'gastric fever,' his son Paul suspects something foul.

It's not long before a cache of incriminating letters are discovered in the hands of a blackmailing servant.

Miss Lemon trusts she's not giving too much away when she says that more than one death and a sensational trial follow. (If Mr. Symons was not a Victorian, he most certainly must have been a barrister.) And through all of this winds the thread that Paul Vandervent grasps much too late: "Somerset Maugham [Paul writes] says somewhere that Victorians felt about women as though they had no back passages." They had no complexity; no strength or integrity.

But those Victorians got it very wrong. Mr. Symons, however, gets it -- and this engaging crime story -- very right.

The Name of Annabel Lee

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we --
Of many far wiser than we --

Like that Old Bailey Hack, Horace Rumpole, Miss Lemon sometimes finds it restorative to quote a bit of poetry when faced with a puzzling set of circumstances. Certainly so must have Julian Symons, the creative mastermind behind a string of great whodunits, including The Plot Against Roger Rider, The Blackheath Poisonings and The Name of Annabel Lee.

For Mr. Symons's poetry professor turned sleuth (the excellently named Dudley Potter), however, the life and creative works of Edgar Allan Poe turn from a scholarly pursuit into something a bit more sinister.

Dudley Potter, like countless academics before him, had given up on love when he meets, seemingly by chance, the aptly named Annabel Lee Featherby. In a blink, the pair end up living together in their inevitable 'Kingdom by the Sea' ... and then things go terribly wrong.

Dudley wakes one morning to discover a vicious hangover and a note on the mantlepiece. His love envied by the angels above is gone. With nothing more than the clues in Poe's work to go by, Dudley tries to find her. His quest, not surprisingly, reveals more closeted skeletons than even Poe can lay claim to.

So, my dear readers, if you like poetry and mystery, and the two twined together, there's little doubt you shall like The Name of Annabel Lee.

Interestingly, Mr. Symons seems to have a bit in common with his protagonist. He was a poet and literary critic of some renown, as well as the founding editor of Twentieth Century Verse, a London-based poetry journal that rivaled New Verse in its heyday. He was also, like his fictional protege, a visiting professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and, not ironically, the 1961 and 1973 recipient of the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award. He was the 1982 MWA grandmaster.

Mr. Symons departed this earthly realm on 19 November 1994.