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!

The Documents in the Case

Miss Lemon just loves a good poisoning ... don't you? 

If so, her faithful readers will not want to miss Dorothy L. Sayers's The Documents in the Case (1930) a marvel of a murder mystery told entirely in the correspondence and written statements of the key figures in the case.

George Harrison, a likable chap devoted to his family and his pastimes, is unceremoniously poisoned by a stew of amanita muscaria, a mushroom famous for its deadly venom. See the photo at right and beware not to mistake it for amanita rubescens, or the comparatively benign and edible 'warty caps.' 

The hitch here is that Mr. Harrison was a seasoned gatherer and connoisseur of edible toadstools -- he even published a book on the topic and illustrated it himself. His son, Paul, finds it impossible to believe that his father would make such an amateurish mistake. So he collects the said documents and forwards them to Sir Gilbert Pugh at the Home Office. And thus an inventive and absorbing narrative unfolds, one that doubles as an armchair investigation.

Miss Lemon finds more than just the meta-form of this novel intriguing. Its creation is something of a curiosity, too. The copy Miss Lemon read, published by the New English Library in 1978, clearly names Robert Eustace as co-author. Yet many other editions -- and bibliographies of Sayers's work -- do not.

Eustace, the nom de plume of Eustace Robert Barton, a doctor and novelist in his own right, is credited by some sources with supplying Sayers with the central plot point and supporting medical and technical details that make The Documents in the Case such a marvel.  At the same time, those details are what sometimes interfered with Miss Lemon's willing suspension of disbelief. The technical whys and scientific wherefores are such that Miss Lemon found it hard to believe such minutia could be recalled in a letter or a written statement.  Unless, of course, the author was an inventive novelist himself.

How much of this work is Sayers's? And how much is Eustace's? Literary sleuths will enjoy puzzling out that question as much as they will the case of one very suspicious death.