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.

Coffin Scarcely Used

One of the things Miss Lemon finds especially charming about the classic British mystery is the vast number of murders that take place in small villages, like Midsomer. Or in the vicinity of certain persons, like Miss Marple.

Things are no different in the small and forgotten English seaport town called Flaxborough, where bodies drop like the proverbial fly. Indeed a coffin is scarcely used before the makers of such capacious conveyances to the netherworld are called upon to provide once again their ministrations for Death. Unnatural death, in this case, caused by person or persons unknown.

Coffin Scarcely Used (1958) has many of the Flaxxy features Miss Lemon has come to expect from Colin Watson -- including a cast of fantastically named, if not fantastically quirky, characters. To wit, there's Harold Carobleat, proprietor of Carobleat and Spades, and the first to find his coffin lowered to the earth.

Carobleat's cohorts include Dr. Rupert Hillyard, with grotesquely splayed teeth and an innate love of scotch; Rodney Gloss, solicitor; Marcus Gwill, owner of the Flaxborough Citizen and a repugnantly self-indulgent eater of sweets; and, lastly but not leastly, Mr. Jonas Bradlaw, undertaker and one-time joiner of said coffins.

But in some ways, Coffin Scarcely Used didn't quite live up to Miss Lemon's expectations. Perhaps because this one is missing the inimitable Miss Teatime -- the yang to Miss Lemon's yin. Or perhaps a slightly overwrought phony antiques racket unnecessarily complicates an already complicated motive for mass murder.

But it's still all in good fun, and Miss Lemon regrets not a moment she spent in the company of the Carobleats, Glosses, and Gwills, traipsing with Inspector Purbright through Flaxborough and looking for the clues that will unearth a gentle murderer.

Miss Lemon's Top Ten for 2009

My dear readers, a new decade is upon us. To tidy up the one that went before, Ms. Kerrie Smith, of Mysteries in Paradise, made the splendid suggestion of drawing up a list of 'Favourite Crime 2009'.

And so Miss Lemon will do just that. Miss Lemon loves lists. Almost as much as she loves mysteries.

1. Taken at the Flood, by Agatha Christie. (Dame Agatha at her cleverest.)

2. Lonelyheart 4122, by Colin Watson. (Features the unparalleled Miss Teatime.)

3. A Pocket Full of Rye, by Agatha Christie. (Who can resist a nursery rhyme that ends in murder?)

4. The Small Hours of the Morning, by Margaret Yorke. (An underappreciated mystery novelist of formidable skill.)

5. The Sittaford Mystery, by Agatha Christie. (The perfect read for a wintry afternoon.)

6. Written in Blood, by Caroline Graham. (The Midsomer Murders at their apex.)

7. Gentlemen & Players, by Joanne Harris. (What one learns at school never ceases to surprise....)

8. Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days, by Jared Cade. (Not precisely a crime novel, per se –- but it reads as well as one and concerns one of Miss Lemon’s favourite principle characters.)

9. The Chinese Bell Murders, by Robert Van Gulik. (Featuring the inimitable Judge Dee, based on a real magistrate from the T’ang Dynasty.)

10. The Lodger, by Marie Belloc Lowndes. (Inspired by Jack the Ripper, this is the moodiest, most atmospheric mystery Miss Lemon has ever read.)

Best wishes to all and happy reading in 2010.

A Murder Is Announced

A murder is announced and will take place on Friday, October 29th, at Little Paddocks, at 6:30 p.m. Friends, please accept this, the only intimation.
--The North Bentham News and Chipping-Cleghorn Gazette, Personals

Now who, Miss Lemon asks, could resist such a tempting little advert?

Certainly not any of the residents of Chipping Cleghorn, who show up, each in turn, at the home of Letitia Blacklock, expecting at the very least to get a decent glass of sherry, if not a game of murder.

There's Mrs. Swettenham -- who finds the advertisement too strange: "Not at all like Letitia Blacklock, who always seems to me such a sensible woman" -- and her son, Edmund. The Easterbrooks (Colonel and Mrs.), Bunch Harmon, the vicar's wife, and the cozily situated Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd, as well as some quite distant cousins of Miss Blacklock and her hysterical cook Mitzi, from somewhere in middle Europe.

When the clock chimes half past six, however, the murder turns out to be no game at all. The lights go out, shots are fired, and a bullet finds its mark in the body of one Rudi Scherz, a Swiss national working at the Royal Spa Hotel in Mendenham Wells. Two others barely miss Miss Blacklock, the unsuspecting hostess.

The obvious questions for Inspector Craddock are these: 1) Who placed the notice announcing the murder for all and sundry to see? 2) What was Rudi Scherz doing at Little Paddocks? 3) Was someone trying to kill Miss Blacklock? 4) What on earth is the motive?

True to Agatha Christie in top form, A Murder Is Announced folds into a classically perplexing puzzle.

A little investigating reveals that Miss Blacklock is likely to inherit a large sum of money, should her employer's widow predecease Miss Blacklock. And that, my dear readers, seems likely to happen soon.

Of course it takes a villager to know a village, and so Miss Jane Marple descends upon Chipping Cleghorn, armed with her knitting needles and the village parallels required to untangle this mysterious small-town murder.

Mrs. Christie has oft been criticized (as recently as in the newly published Talking About Detective Fiction by P.D. James) for her stereotyped characters and sleight of hand. Miss Lemon thinks this unfair. What many of Mrs. Christie's critics fail to recognize is her mastery at interpreting character quirks, her gift for writing snappy dialogue and most of all, her ingenious plotting skills. All of these graces are present here.

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.

The Killings at Badger's Drfit

Miss Lemon was pleasantly surprised at how much she recently enjoyed reading two entries in Caroline Graham's Midsomer Murders series, which feature the worldly Chief Inspector Barnaby and his sometimes surly partner, Sergeant Troy.

The duo from Causton CID make their debut in The Killings at Badger's Drift, with Badger's Drift being a quaint little English village not so unlike another fictional scene of murder among the tea-sipping set: Flaxborough.

In Badger's Drift, a spinster English teacher on the trail of a ghost orchid spots something among the flora that's far more sensual -- and scandalous.

And more than one resident of Badger's Drift proves willing to go to any length to keep Miss Simpson's find a secret.

In Written in Blood, the fourth entry in the Midsomer series, the Midsomer Worthy writer's group gets more material than it ever could have hoped for after one of its founding members is found bludgeoned to death after a key meeting.

What binds both of these novels together, beyond the recurring characters, is Ms. Graham's clever way of revealing the dank and twisted recesses that accompany the human condition. Everyone in these stories, it seems, has something to hide -- if not something of which to be outright ashamed.

Ms. Graham also has an exceptional sense of humor, and quite frankly, a gift for delicious satire. Whether she's skewering the absurdities of post-modern theatre (viz, Brian Clapton's "Slanghwang for Five Mute Voices" in Written in Blood) or Mrs. Barnaby's complete and total lack of culinary skill, Miss Lemon promises you that you will laugh, aloud and often, while reading her work.

Cats and dogs also make excellent characters in the Midsomer series. The author makes an Irish wolfhound and a stray cat called Kilmowsky come more vividly to life than entire casts of characters featured in weaker novels that Miss Lemon has read.

In sum, she thinks that if her readers enjoy a cracking good murder with their afternoon tea, then they will enjoy just about anything by Caroline Graham.

Lonelyheart 4122

Miss Lemon, my dear readers, fears she has met her match.

Never did she expect to find within the pages of Colin Watson's Lonelyheart 4122 a character of such remarkable individuality and on par (if you will pardon Miss Lemon for saying so) with the more enigmatic creations of Mrs. Agatha Christie herself -- Mrs. Ariadne Oliver, Mr. Harley Quinn, and, er-hem, Miss Felicity Lemon.

(If my Christian name comes as a surprise, take comfort in the fact that it's been an extraordinarily well-kept secret. Even Mr. Poirot didn't discover it until 1955, when working on the Hickory Dickory Dock case.)

The character to rival Miss Lemon's sphinxdom is one Miss Lucilla Teatime, described as "remarkably trim and handsome." Indeed, those with the fortune to meet Miss Teatime instinctively approve of her ... "for there was in her appearance the flattering suggestion that she had taken pains to spare one personally the spectacle of yet another dumpy, disgruntled, defeated old woman."

Hmmm. Miss Lemon is not entirely sure that the foregoing passage is complimentary. Then again, perhaps isn't wasn't meant to be. In any case, Miss Teatime, just arrived from London, is far and away more than the regular folk of Flaxborough ("a market town of some antiquity with remarkable social and political intransigence") bargained for.

Shortly after her arrival in said town, Miss Teatime becomes a client of a matrimonial agency with a dubious reputation for success. Two of its women clients had recently laid hold of large sums of money and then went missing. Which is where Inspector Purbright comes in.

Come to think of it, Purbright rather reminds Miss Lemon of her dear friend Japp: tall, gangly, well-meaning but sometimes a little slow on the uptake. Perhaps there's more of Agatha Christie in Colin Watson's work than he'd care to admit.

What Miss Lemon is sure of, however, is that fans of her can't help but become fans of him.