Speak for the Dead

Miss Lemon seems never to tire of Margaret Yorke. There's something about the crispness of her sentences and the simple delicacy with which she tells complicated and compelling stories that draws Miss Lemon back again and again.

What's more, her range of psychological portrayals is nothing short of virtuosic. She can convey the motives of a middle-aged, middle-class serial rapist with as much realism as she can the mental workings of a common street thug. The characters she creates for Speak for the Dead (1988) are no exception to her great ability.

She presents us with Gordon Matthews, an intelligent but directionless product of a privileged home. His mother is obsessed with the rigidity and grandeur of the Russian tsars, while his father whiles away his retirement drinking beer at the pub and making futile passes at the woman who runs the till at the local hardware store. Gordon, it's revealed early on, has spent time in prison for manslaughter; but what actually precipitated these charges -- and the validity of the charges themselves -- is a matter of perspective.

Upon Gordon's release, he meets Carrie Foster, a vibrant and clever girl, much more able to fend for herself than Gordon's previous wife. But not all is straightforward beneath Carrie's pleasant and capable facade. Carrie, in her turn, meets Nicholas Fitzmaurice, a sweet and innocent seeming boy -- 'such a pet,' as she likes to refer to him -- until the truths that surface become more than he can handle.

The characters' collective foibles prove to be a volatile mix and make for a mesmerizing story.

If you've not yet tried reading Margaret Yorke, you really must. Many of her titles are now out of print but are easy enough to find second-hand. They would also make an excellent candidate for Felony & Mayhem re-issues.

The Hand of Death

By now, my dear readers, you must know what a devoted admirer Miss Lemon has become of Margaret Yorke. Reading the sometimes grim -- but never dull -- The Hand of Death (1981) has done nothing to alter that opinion.

Like Agatha Christie's genius for hiding her murderers in plain sight, Margaret Yorke has the uncanny ability to dip into the most ordinary stock of Englishmen -- in this case, it is the quiet antiques dealer, Ronald Trimm -- and pull out the ones capable of the most shocking crimes. Though you'd hardly guess it from the face they put to the village at large, their secret lives and outrageous crimes are made completely plausible by Yorke's pen.

When Trimm's (aptly named in this novel, as he likes everything just so) advances are rebuffed by the marvelously depicted widow, Dorothea Wyatt, he sets off on a violent sexual spree. Almost as difficult to take as Trimm's selfishness and brutality, is the plot twist that puts the lonely widower and loyal friend to Dorothea, George Fortescue, into the frame for rape and murder.

Miss Lemon must warn her fans of cosy mysteries that The Hand of the Death is not one. For those who can stomach a bit of fictional violence, however, this novel is well worth the read -- indeed it is impossible to put down, once one has picked it up.

Within pages, it becomes clear why the pathetic Ronald Trimm behaves so abominably, proving again Margaret Yorke's mastery of psychological character study. She throws in a bit of good police procedural, too, but with just the right touch.

All of the characters in this novel, sympathetic or despicable as they are, are fully realized, which is what, Miss Lemon reckons, so ofter draws her back to Margaret Yorke.

Safely to the Grave

Miss Lemon doubts she has ever met a character in mystery so unrelentingly pernicious as Mick Harvey.

He's a villain to outdo all of Margaret Yorke's villains. And she, the mistress of the psychological thriller, knows how to paint startling portraits of evil.
 
When we first meet Mick, he is not only rough with his wife, Beverley, and a thundering bully to his neighbours, but he also quickly reveals himself to be mean, cocksure, prone to drink and quick to blame others for all of his own shortcomings. His hair is permed, he wears a weak mustache and the beginnings of a beer belly.

Just the sorts of things one hopes to find in an anti-hero, aren't they?

But there is nothing redeeming or heroic about Mick Harvey. After cleaning out Beverley's purse and spending the evening at the Cricketers, Mick tries to run two women off the road who are returning from a night at the ballet. When Marion Quilter and Laura Burdock decide to report the incident of dangerous driving to the police, they set off a chain of events that seems as much the product of ill fate as random chance.

Miss Lemon isn't revealing too much when she says that Mick proves more than once that he's not afraid to kill anyone who stands in his way: not even a dog.   

This is in many ways an upsetting novel. And yet ... as much, my stalwart readers, as you will want to put down Safely to the Grave (1986), Miss Lemon tells you that you will not be able to do so.

The Smooth Face of Evil

Miss Lemon recently took a holiday jaunt to New York City, where she spent time browsing in The Mysterious Bookshop on Warren Street in TriBeCa. This august emporium (devotedly exclusively, one might guess, to Miss Lemon's favourite subject) is the place in North America to acquire new, second-hand and rare copies of a broad range of the novels of crime, mystery and suspense most worth having.

To wit, for $3 Miss Lemon picked up The Smooth Face of Evil (1984), a gripping tale of vintage psychological suspense by Margaret Yorke.

If it is cliche to say that once she began reading this story about the smooth talking con artist who meets with his comeuppance in a most unexpected way, she could not put it down -- well then, you will have to excuse Miss Lemon's triteness, for it is the truth.

From the moment Terry Brett smashes his stolen Vauxhall into Alice Armitage's illicitly borrowed Volvo, and then alters the details of the event to make things seem like they happened the other way round, Miss Lemon was hooked. She suspects her readers will be, too.

As is her wont, Ms. Yorke graces The Smooth Face of Evil with the most telling points of psychological detail. Alice Armitage, for instance, is a lonely and aging (though in now way frail or elderly) widow who is manipulated into going to live with her son, Giles, and daughter-in-law Helen far from the Bournemouth coast where she lived independently and happily. When Alice arrives at Harcombe House, she quickly sees that she is welcome only for the money she brings from the sale of her house, as Helen quickly dispatches her to a frigid attic apartment. In short, isolated and unwelcome, she is ripe for conning.

Terry Brett is the sort who can talk his way out of trouble and into the hearts and purses of even the most worldly of British housewives. The rewards for these endeavours, along with an occasional car theft, are handsome.

Sue Norris, a tenant of the Harcombe House Lodge, who lives there, unmarried, with Jonathan, meets Terry after the smashup. Worldly is not quite the way to describe Sue. Despite Terry's charming curls and neat suit, Sue picks him out for what he is, and a strange alliance is formed.

Just who ends up conning whom -- and who runs the risk of murder Miss Lemon shall leave for her readers to discover. The journey to the crime's unraveling is nine-tenths of the fun.

Forgotten Book Friday: Death on Account

Here it is, Friday again. Miss Lemon hardly knows where the time gets to. So before this day gives her the slip, she would like to use it to remind her readers of an excellent but now mostly forgotten novel by Margaret Yorke: Death on Account.   

First published by Hutchinson in 1979 but now long out of print, Death on Account remains an incisive study of the social and psychological forces that drive even the most benignant of persons to commit outrageous crimes.

Robbie Robinson is a middle-aged banker. He's never broken into the ranks of management, but he is quite competent at what he does.

In the eyes of his bullying wife, Isabel, however, Robbie is a complete failure -- good only for bringing her tea trays in bed at the weekends and fixing things about the house. The childless couple has long stopped sharing a bedroom.

When Isabel decides to sell the house that Robbie loves and move the pair to a more pretentious neighbourhood, the sleepwalking Robbie slowly awakens.

And what doozies his dreams have been. Robbie works out an elaborate plan to raid his own bank. He tells himself it is only a fantasy. But then he goes ahead with what is -- with one small exception -- a very clever plan.

As in any good Margaret Yorke novel, the chain of events that unfold link the most unlikely characters in the most intriguing ways. Robbie, who is not yet unattractive and skilled at woodworking, finds himself involved with the young woman he held up. And the reader can hardly begrudge Robbie this fleeting romance.

Indeed, Miss Lemon thought him to be one of the most sympathetic Margaret Yorke villains she's met to date. And much of the tension comes from when and how Robbie's deeds will be discovered.

Miss Lemon suspects that Mrs. Yorke's tongue was more than a little in her cheek when she chose the name for her unfortunate protagonist. Clearly, she enjoyed herself while writing Death on Account. The prose is crisp and simple; and at the same time, unsettlingly profound.

No Medals for the Major

Pardon Miss Lemon if she seems to be on a tear with Margaret Yorke. But really, she finds the author's books so atmospheric, so tense and so psychologically astute, that sometimes it is all she can do to prevent herself from reading one right after another.

No Medals for the Major (1974) is no exception to the calibre of Ms. Yorke's oeuvre. From the book's excellent title to its dark yet completely plausible ending, Miss Lemon could not find a single fault. 

This story concerns one Major Johnson, a small and solitary man of dignified bearing but no real distinction, who strives to assimilate himself into retired life in the village of Wiveldown. The small inroads he makes are quickly blockaded when the body of a young girl who'd recently gone missing turns up in the boot of his car.

Forget innocent until proven guilty. The mob mentality that sweeps through the village and is then turned against the Major is enough to send even the gentlest of souls of a murderous spree. But that's not what happens here.... 

Like many of her novels, No Medals for the Major is a whydunit rather than a whodunit. And as in her others, the pieces of narrative puzzle are woven together in a startlingly clever pattern. 

Once employed as a librarian at Oxford, some of Ms. Yorke's most interesting characters are librarians. They are the recurring figures to look out for in her fiction. And trust Miss Lemon when she says that these librarians scale the range from shushing spinsters and sensitive intellectuals, to shrewd and self-serving backstabbers.  

Lest one fear that Miss Lemon shall soon exhaust the entire retinue of Margaret Yorkes and have nothing more to recommend, she promises this won't happen. At least not in the near future.

Margaret Yorke has written nearly 30 crime novels to date, with several of the early entries featuring the Oxford don and amateur sleuth Dr. Patrick Grant. (Miss Lemon is savouring those.)  Ms. Yorke also has authored some ten non-mystery novels, including Summer Flight (1957), Once a Stranger (1962) and The Limbo Ladies (1969).

Margaret Yorke was born in Surrey in 1924, and as far as Miss Lemon knows, is still hard at work at her craft and living in a village in Buckinghamshire.

The Scent of Fear

Looking at this photograph of Margaret Yorke, one can't help but think that if there's a universal face of a mystery writer, this must be it.  Eyes that miss nothing. An ironic smile that says, 'Of course I know that people are rarely what they seem.'

Both of these qualities are abundantly in evidence within the pages of The Scent of Fear (1980), an unputdownable portrait of a boy who goes badly wrong and whose crimes end up threading together disparate lives in the most unexpected ways.

Indeed, one of Margaret Yorke's most remarkable talents as a writer is her ability to people a village seemingly at random, with character types that run the gamut from well-to-do spinsters and high-flying solicitors to petty criminals and arsonists. Her psychological analyses are as unflinching as they are astute. Best of all, she seems to have perfected the sacred art of showing her readers how or why her characters are lonely and isolated ... or even criminal. Never does she simply tell.

Really, Miss Lemon thinks that Margaret Yorke is one of Britain's most underappreciated mystery novelists. She once said in an interview that she's most interested in writing whydunnits, perhaps because character is what attracts her writerly instincts. If you've ever read A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell, you know of what Miss Lemon speaks.

Character and its motivation are especially well drawn in The Scent of Fear, the same for which is true in Find Me a Villain and  The Small Hours of the Morning. Margaret Yorke has a knack for creating tension by revealing clues to certain characters just a beat too late.

She's also no weak hand behind the mise-en-scene. If you like your mysteries with plenty of tea, sherry and foul weather, you'll certainly like Margaret Yorke.

Find Me a Villain

Miss Lemon was just ruminating on the insular English village. One doesn't find anything quite like it in other English speaking parts of the world, like, say, America or New Zealand -- does one?

With names like Hanging on the Wold, Bishop's Cleeve and Little Tipping, there's a netherworld charm to these places that so stubbornly resist the modern tread of time. They are places where, not so many years ago, one had to sort out in advance which neighbors were or were not on the 'phone. It hardly mattered in any case, as the neighbors are never more than a few hundred yards' walk away.

They are places that, even today, some English know only through the novels of Agatha Christie. At least that's the idea of village life held by Nina Crowther, the protagonist of Margaret Yorke's excellent mystery called Find Me a Villain (1983).

The Mrs. Crowther in question is a lifelong Londoner, and she's just been chucked by her philandering husband. Having no profession or training beyond housekeeping, she goes to the village of Netherton St. Mary to act as houseminder for Priscilla and Leonard Blunt, owners of a stately village pile called, simply, The Hall.

Rivaling its stateliness is the nearby Manor, owned by Col. and Mrs. Jowett. The two families' lives have intertwined over the years in a manner akin to Virginia creeper and village stone masonry.

Lacking the village parallels that prove so useful to Miss Marple as she susses out the villains in St. Mary Mead, Mrs. Crowther hardly knows what to make of the requisite eccentricities of her neighbors. Col. Jowett, retired from the Army and now a painter of dubious talent, wanders off from time to time, sometimes forgetting where or, indeed, who he is.

Heather Jowett is earthy and dotty, known to wander the village fields randomly planting bulbs and clearing brush. Then there's the Blunts' gardener, Dan Fenton, retired from an unspecified career in civil service, who makes frequent and unexplained trips to London.

Margaret Yorke, a former librarian and chair of the Crime Writers' Association, deftly evokes the mood of classic village mystery. The Hall, for example, is too distant from the village centre to receive delivery of a daily paper. And during an especially violent gale, Mrs. Crowther loses her telephone connection.

Alone with herself for the first time in perhaps twenty years, Mrs. Crowther quickly begins to suspect that her kooky neighbors perhaps aren't quite as harmless as they first appeared. Meanwhile, when the telephone is in order, Nina receives a series of calls in which the person at the other end utters nothing but a baleful sigh. Add to that, the disappearance and murder of several young runaway girls, two bodies of whom turn up near Netherton St. Mary.

The title of this suspenseful and moody novel, Miss Lemon begs her readers to note, is ironic. For the last place Nina Crowther expects to find a villain is in the sleepy English village she supposed would provide refuge from the rough sea of urban existence.