Patricia Wentworth: More Than Miss Silver

I don't read all that many cozy mysteries, but I have a soft spot for Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver series. Miss Silver is a retired teacher who may be sitting in a corner, knitting, when visitors come to call on a country house.

The visitors are told Miss Silver is an old family friend or relative, and they assume that the family is providing a little bit of comfort and company for an old lady living in genteel poverty. Little do they suspect that Miss Silver is unobtrusively gathering information that will reveal a blackmailer or even a killer.

I read the whole Miss Silver series (32 books!) back in the 1970s, when they
were already decades old and Patricia Wentworth had been dead for well over a decade. In the last couple of years, I've enjoyed revisiting some of them in audiobook versions, perfectly performed by Diana Bishop.

What I didn't realize is that Patricia Wentworth wrote many other mystery books outside the Miss Silver series; a couple of dozen standalones and three short series. Luckily for us, in addition to the Miss Silvers, Open Road Integrated Media is reissuing the other books in ePub and Kindle ebook formats. Here are the series titles:

The Ernest Lamb series

The Blind Side

When the handsome but evil Ross Craddock is found killed with his own gun, there is a wealth of suspects who had the motive to kill.  The London Metropolitan Police department's Inspector Ernest Lamb, and young Detective Frank Abbott have their work cut out for them.



Who Pays the Piper

Lucas Dale is determined to break up the engagement of Susan Lenox and Bill Carrick, so that he can have Susan for himself. A spot of blackmail seems to have done the trick, until Dale is found murdered. Lamb and Abbott suspect Carrick, but soon find that there are quite a few others who wished Dale dead.





Pursuit of a Parcel

Lamb and Abbott become enmeshed in a deadly game of World War II espionage, with agents and double agents, mysterious parcels and a beautiful young woman in danger.

The Benbow Smith series

Fool Errant

A mysterious woman warns Hugo Ross not to take a job with an eccentric inventor, but Hugo needs the money. Soon he finds himself embroiled in a world of espionage and danger, and calls on Benbow Smith of the Foreign Office for help.



Danger Calling

Benbow Smith recruits Lindsay Trevor, a former British intelligence agent, to rejoin the clandestine services to help catch a master criminal.

Walk With Care

Benbow Smith becomes involved in an investigation to uncover the forces working to eliminate voices in favor of disarmament.




Down Under

When bride-to-be Anne Carew disappears, her desperate fiancé, Captain Oliver Loddon, contacts Benbow Smith. Smith believes this is just the latest of a series of abductions over the past few years by one man, but the police disagree. Loddon will risk his own life to save Anne.

Frank Garrett series

Dead or Alive

On the very day Meg O'Hara asks her Irish spy husband, Robin, for a divorce, he disappears. Time passes and he's presumed dead, but then Meg receives a message suggesting otherwise. Frank Garrett of the British Foreign Office investigates, along with Bill Coverdale, who has been in love with Meg for years.

Rolling Stone

While Frank Garrett investigates a series of thefts of valuable artworks, his nephew goes undercover to penetrate an international gang of dangerous thieves.

There are too many other Wentworth mysteries to list here, even when you exclude the Miss Silvers. But if you want to see which ones are now available from Open Road, just head here.

If you enjoy romance novels, Wentworth started out as a romance writer and Open Road has a couple of those as well: A Marriage Under the Terror, set during the French Revolution, and A Fire Within, which hints at the Miss Silver to come.

Note: Open Road Integrated Media provided me with review e-copies of Fool Errant, Dead or Alive and The Blind Side.

Images source: openroadmedia.com

Gift Shopping for Books: The Golden Age

No matter what winter holiday you celebrate, this is the gift-giving season. This week, I'll give you suggestions for some book lovers on your list. We'll start today with so-called Golden Age mysteries, which came into prominence during the 1920s and '30s. Some of the best-known Golden Age authors are Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Michael Innes, Edmund Crispin, Margery Allingham, Georgette Heyer, Josephine Tey, John Dickson Carr, and Patricia Wentworth. (Sister Mary mentions more in her November 28, 2015 post.) If you're not personally familiar with these writers, don't dismiss them out of hand as being too old-fashioned to bother with. Golden Age books can be witty or charming and are also great for readers of more modern traditional mysteries inspired by the Golden Age, such as those by Simon Brett, Peter Lovesey, and Sarah Caudwell, in which violence is mostly off-stage. (We'll talk about traditional mysteries on another day.)

There are many terrific books a Golden Age fan may not have read, and you can find them in a good used bookstore or online. On the list below, I've starred books for people who have oodles of Golden Age mysteries under their belts; they probably haven't read these unless they're connoisseurs of the period. Needless to say, I haven't tried to be comprehensive. If you want more recommendations, I'm happy to supply them. I've also included some other gift suggestions, if you want an accompaniment for your book.

Margery Allingham
More Work for the Undertaker features Albert Campion and the eccentric Palinode family, now reduced to poverty and further reduced by murder.
Accompany with: a word game such as Scrabble (poison-pen letters feature in this book)

Francis Beeding
*Death Walks in Eastrepps recounts one unexpected murder after another in a quiet English coastal village, Old Bailey proceedings, and a surprise ending.
Accompany with: trivets in the shape of fish or boats

Nicholas Blake
Shell of Death (APA Thou Shell of Death), set on Christmas weekend in an English country house, involves a suicide staged to look like murder.
Accompany with: the vintage card game Authors (Blake is the pen name of poet Cecil Day-Lewis, father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis)

Agatha Christie
And Then There Were None (APA Ten Little Indians) features strangers on a private island dropping like flies, one by one.
Accompany with: something that also disappears, one after another, such as a plate of homemade cookies (Maida Heatter's recipes are sensational) or some delicious artisan chocolate from Portland, Oregon, Seattle or New York City. (If you were born in Europe, clutching French candy or a Swiss chocolate in your hand, you don't need help from me.)

John Dickson Carr
The Three Coffins (APA The Hollow Man), a "locked-room" mystery, contains Dr. Gideon Fell's famous "Locked-Room Lecture."
Accompany with: a charm bracelet that carries a tiny key; a lockable box for little treasures

Cyril Hare
Tragedy at Law takes place as Judge Barber receives threatening letters while traveling the English Southern Circuit and is told from the viewpoint of down-at-the-heels lawyer Francis Pettigrew.
Accompany with: some beautiful stationery and a snazzy pen
[Note: Sister Mary previously mentioned Hare's An English Murder, a winter must-read due to its snowed-in English country house setting. I'm mentioning it again here because I love it, and it would be perfectly accompanied by a pair of warm slippers or a beautiful little snow globe.]

Georgette Heyer
No Wind of Blame assembles an oddball cast of characters at the English country house of a good-natured, wealthy American widow and then kills off the most likely candidate for being murdered.
Accompany with: a bottle of Russian vodka (one of the characters is an iffy Russian prince)

Richard Hull
*The Murder of My Aunt is told from the viewpoint of a satisfactorily unpleasant young man who plots to kill his aunt, no great prize herself, for an inheritance.
Accompany with: a board game that requires strategy, such as Monopoly or Risk

Michael Innes
Hamlet, Revenge! involves an amateur production of Hamlet during a house party at the Duke of Horton's palatial home, and a young Inspector John Appleby investigates the murder of one of the players.
Accompany with: a DVD of Hamlet, of course

Paul McGuire
*A Funeral in Eden (APA Burial Service) features a stranger found with his head bashed in on an idyllic island beach.
Accompany with: ingredients for piña coladas, tiny paper umbrellas, and appropriate glasses

Dorothy L. Sayers
Murder Must Advertise takes place at a London advertising agency full of clever ad writers.
Accompany with: a T-shirt carrying a famous advertising jingle or the maker's name on the front
The Nine Tailors, an exceedingly atmospheric book, finds Sir Peter Wimsey and Bunter stranded at an East Anglia rectory in time to help bell ringers usher in the New Year.
Accompany with: some homemade muffins (trust me, the reader will need some when reading this) or some English stout

If you haven't yet read Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, a crime fiction classic, buy it for yourself. This is the one in which Inspector Grant, confined to his hospital bed, decides to tackle the guilt or innocence of Richard III in the deaths of the two princes in the Tower. For proper reading, you'll also need a bed tray for reading in bed, but don't feel you need to eat jello or other bland, hospital-like food. I suggest accompanying this book with hot tea or hot chocolate and cookies.

Balm for the Sun-Baked Brain

I don't know about you, but my brain just doesn't feel like functioning at its peak when the temperature gets above sweater weather. In the summer, I prefer books that aren't too long, complex or serious.

Patricia Wentworth

This summer, I've found the perfect books, and they're a blast from the past. Three-plus decades ago, I read all of Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver series. I still have those old paperbacks, tucked behind the hardcovers on my mystery bookshelves.

Patricia Wentworth was born in 1878 in India, and sent back to England to school. Her first novel was published in 1910 and she went on to write 70 more, 32 of which were in the Miss Silver series. Her last Miss Silver novel, The Girl in the Cellar, was published in 1961, the year of Wentworth's death.

Miss Silver is a former schoolteacher, now a private detective––or private enquiry agent, as she prefers to call it. She's an unassuming old spinster who can usually be found knitting sweaters for the infant children of her niece, and chatting with others at whatever country home she may be visiting. When she's called on to investigate, it never seems to be a problem to invite her into a home as some distant relation or family friend who can sit unobtrusively off to the side and absorb clues.

Sounds like Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple, doesn't it? Miss Silver came first, though, appearing in The Grey Mask (1928) a couple of years before Miss Marple first made her appearance in print. And Miss Silver is more tight-lipped and has a harder shell than Miss Marple.

Miss Silver has a couple of secret weapons. The first is that nobody thinks she's anything but a harmless old bluehair, so they drop clues and revelatory comments around her with abandon. The second is that she has contacts within the police force who take her seriously. One is her old pupil, Chief Constable Randal March, and others are Scotland Yard's Detective Inspector Frank Abbott, and Detective Chief Inspector Lamb. (It's true that Lamb calls her a busybody, but he does pay attention to what she says, especially since she's adept at making him think he reached her deductions first.)

I'll admit that the Miss Silver novels are formulaic. Almost always, a young couple's romance is threatened by a murder, particularly because one of the couple is often Lamb's Suspect Number One. Maudie, as Frank sometimes thinks of her to himself, has a soft spot for young love and always manages to smooth the way for romance by unveiling the real killer. I could live with a little less of Miss Silver's quirks, repeated in each book, like her habit of giving a "deprecating cough" to indicate disapproval, but these things are to be expected in a long-running series and, after all, it's not the normal mode to devour the books one after another.

What I like best about Maudie is that she focuses on human nature to figure out the whodunnit. It isn't that she ignores physical clues, but rather that she interprets them through a prism of the characters' personalities, and human nature in general, to put them all together and reveal the only logical explanation. I'm not usually much of a cozy reader, but I do like traditional British mysteries, and a good character-driven story, which is Patricia Wentworth all over.

I've been listening to the Miss Silver books on audio, which has been particularly entertaining. They seem to be made for audio, and Diana Bishop, who narrates many of the books in the series, is terrific. Often, in books with a lot of dialogue, the narrator works so hard to differentiate the voices that it sounds silly. Bishop doesn't make that mistake, and the dialogue just flows.

So far, I've listened to The Chinese Shawl (1943), The Traveller Returns (1948; originally published in 1945 as She Came Back) and Out of the Past (1953). In each case, there is one character whom it is a deep pleasure to hate and whose comeuppance is eagerly anticipated. Miss Silver unravels the tangle of clues like a bit of yarn the cat has been at, and presents a neatly woven solution, restoring order to the world and allowing the young lovers to start their lives together. Very satisfying when the summer heat leaves me feeling lazy!

Not Quite Famous

In April, Periphera gave us a delicious peek into the Golden Age of Mystery. It is fascinating to realize that almost a hundred years have passed, and this genre is as popular now as it was then. It might be because certain commandments had to be obeyed to the letter. Ronald Knox set these out in 1929.

1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
2. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
3. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
4. No Chinaman must figure in the story. [My apologies; unfortunately, Knox really did write this.]
5. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition, which proves to be right.
6. The detective himself must not commit the crime.
7. The detective is bound to declare any clues, which he may discover.
8. The "sidekick" of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts, which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
9. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

The names of the Queens and Kings of Crime during this era are familiar to us all. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham are all household names. So are John Dickson Carr, Anthony Berkeley and Freeman Wills Crofts. These were all British, of course, but Earl Derr Biggers, Ellery Queen and Mary Roberts Rinehart were prolific writers on this side of the Atlantic.

My interest has been in some of the mysteries written by the lesser lights of the time. There are several publishers who have made a great effort to keep some of these authors in print.

I really love books released by Felony & Mayhem Press. These are such high quality softcover books that it is a pleasure just to handle them, as well as read them. This press has republished many classic mysteries by well-known authors from several different ages. I have been rereading some of the Ngaio Marsh series, which features Superintendent Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard. Marsh was from New Zealand and could not resist setting several murders on her home islands that required Alleyn's expertise. More than once, Alleyn would just pop over to the other side of the world to help the New Zealand police.

In Overture to Death, Marsh follows the Knox recipe very well. Take one Squire, one Parson, one Parson's daughter, one Squire's son, throw in a couple of nosey-parker biddies and stir well. The background of the story is a local theatrical production that arouses all the emotions likely to cause trouble: envy, pride, vanity and hatred.

I am not as fond of Margery Allingham's Albert Campion, but since Felony & Mayhem has printed more of this author than any other, I look forward to trying a few more in the series.

Books put out by the Rue Morgue Press, run by Tom and (the late) Enid Schantz of Lyons, Colorado, are also keepers. I have collected and read most of them.

In the beginning of each book, the Schantzes include a comprehensive and entertaining essay about the author's works and life. Sadly, Enid succumbed to cancer in 2011, and Tom may be slowing down as well, because the quarterly newsletter has not been in the mail for some time.

One of the first of the Rue Morgue list that I read was The Chinese Chop by Juanita Sheridan. Sheridan led a very colorful life, and she used her experiences to broaden the lives of her readers. In The Chinese Chop, she introduces Lily Wu, a young Chinese-American woman; beautiful, intelligent and a sleuth as well. She partners up with Janice Cameron, a Hawaiian-born writer, to solve crimes.

The first of the four novels in the Lily Wu Quartet takes place at the end of World War II. The author does an excellent job of depicting the housing shortage in New York and there is an excellent feel for the customs, the clothing, and the lives of those uprooted by the war. The mystery deals with a murder in a rooming house that began life as a mansion.

The rest of the series is set in Hawaii, and here, as well, there is a wonderful sense of time and place.

By the way, a Chinese chop is actually a seal to sign documents and important paperwork.

One of my recent finds is the Resurrected Press. They have a list of books by authors who are new to me, and some of whom have been almost entirely forgotten. One such case is that of Archibald Fielding. Fielding's books are quintessential Golden Age British mysteries and they include the country houses, the list of eccentric characters and, of course, the astute detective––Chief Inspector Pointer in this case. But even more mysterious is the actual identity of the author. Even though more than 20 novels were published under this name, any records regarding A. E. Fielding were presumably lost during World War II. For a long time, the works were attributed to a middle-aged woman named Dorothy Fielding. Researches have found the woman in records, but no evidence that she ever wrote or published anything.

In Mystery at the Rectory, Fielding plots the tale of a well-loved rector who is murdered after delivering an unusual extemporaneous sermon. The clue to his death might be found in these last words.

In Murder in a Library, by Charles J. Dutton, there is the seemingly motiveless murder of a librarian in the library––not with a candlestick, however. In this case, Harley Manners, professor of abnormal psychology, is called upon with the hopes that he can shed light on the matter.

Resurrected Press has a long list of obscure authors whose works I am looking forward to sampling.

The British Library also has a nice line in republished crime mysteries, in its British Library Crime Classics series. I started with The Lake District Murder, by John Bude, one of several rural mysteries that take place in locations far from London.

In this story, the detective interest is split between the police professionals and a very likable pair of amateurs, a vicar and a doctor. This is a tale about a farmer who is on his way home one night when he runs out of gas. When he reaches a garage to fill up his gas can, he finds one of the garage owners dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. It is one of those murder-versus-suicide plots, but Inspector Meredith of the county police force doesn't accept the idea of suicide. The focus is on the process by which the police reconstruct the modus operandi.

There are two others in my vacation reading basket from the British Library Crime Classics collection. Murder Underground, and Death on the Cherwell, which are both by Mavis Doriel Hay. Hay attended Oxford, like Dorothy Sayers, and this latter book takes place at a fictional Oxford college. I don't suppose that either will be as well-crafted as a Christie or a Sayers, but I hope they will be entertaining.

Last, but not least, I want to include an Australian writer who deserves a little credit for her work; she is Mary Fortune.

Twenty years before the adventures of Sherlock Holmes were published, Aussie readers were treated to a serial featuring Detective Mark Sinclair, which appeared in the Australian Journal. This sleuth, like the more recent Ellery Queen, was the result of collaboration by two writers. Waif Wander and John Borlase put out nine stories in 1865, before their partnership broke up. The Journal began releasing more episodes of the Sinclair saga in 1868, and the series ran for several decades. At first, readers assumed that Waif Wander was the author of these cases, because the stories were attributed to W.W.

But almost a century later, in 1950, the true identity of the author was uncovered. She was Mary Fortune, who was born in Ireland, grew up in Canada, and moved to Australia in mid-century with her father, who went down under for the gold rush.

Mary married a policeman who patrolled the goldfields. She was a poet, a journalist and a prolific short story writer who eventually died in obscurity, circa 1910. One of her early stories was republished in the September, 2014 issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Titled "Traces of Crime," the story takes place at the height of the gold rush. This quaint tale is about an assault on a "female of a character so diabolical in itself, as to have aroused the utmost anxiety in the public as well as in the police." The unfortunate woman was so injured and abused that "her life was despaired of." Detective Sinclair goes undercover, and uses great ingenuity and perspicacity to catch the perpetrator of the crime.

There are several other fairly obscure authors flying under the radar who are favorites of mine: J.J. Marric, Nicholas Blake, Richard Bachman, Samuel Holt, Glyn Carr, Barbara Vine, Bernard Bastable, Salvatore Lombino and Robert Galbraith. Of course, the last of these is familiar as the pseudonym of J. K. Rowling. The others are all pseudonyms as well. Do you know their more famous monikers?

Review of Jill Paton Walsh's The Late Scholar

The Late Scholar by Jill Paton Walsh

First off, I should say that Dorothy L. Sayers is my all-time favorite mystery writer and her Gaudy Night, set at Oxford University, is the one mystery that I re-read regularly. Despite those things, I don't object to the idea of someone else coming along and continuing the story of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, or of setting one of those continuations at Oxford, which Sayers brought so powerfully to life in Gaudy Night.

The Trustees of Dorothy L. Sayers's estate gave permission to Jill Paton Walsh to continue the Wimsey/Vale series, and The Late Scholar (Minotaur Books, June 17, 2014) is the fourth book she's published in the series since 1998. Maybe it's because Paton Walsh is herself a graduate of Oxford University that I found this book to be the most assured of all of her continuation books.  But more than that, this book is heartfelt and has a comfortable feeling. Those may be odd adjectives to apply to a murder mystery, but they really do apply here.

Lord Peter, who is now the Duke of Denver, is by hereditary gift the Visitor of the college of St. Severin's at Oxford. He is a Balliol College (at Oxford) man himself, and his wife, mystery writer Harriet Vane, is a graduate of Oxford's (fictional) Shrewsbury College. When Peter is called upon as Visitor to settle a dispute over whether St. Severin's should sell a manuscript and buy land with the proceeds, he and Harriet use this as a good excuse to spend some time at their alma mater.

One of the initially troubling aspects of St. Severin's calling on Peter to step in is that the voting about the matter is deadlocked because the college's Warden has gone missing. Peter learns that there have been other attacks on college dons with voting rights on the issue––and soon there are still more. (It reminded me of that great title, Landscape with Dead Dons, from Robert Robinson (1956).) Clearly, some sleuthing is in order and that's what Peter, Harriet and Peter's man Bunter set out to do.

The investigation is carried out in that good, old-fashioned Golden Age tradition of the "fair play" mystery novel. Pay close attention and you can put the clues together along with the detective.  Meanwhile, though, you will also get to listen in on learned academic discussions about the manuscript; experience dinner at the college's high table; visit with Harriet's eccentric old colleagues at Shrewsbury College, whom you will remember from Gaudy Night; enjoy a couple of river walks and views out over Oxford's famous dreaming spires; and even spend a little time with Peter's delightfully dotty old mother.

It's the pleasure of a fair play mystery and of feeling at home again in Lord Peter and Harriet's Oxford that made this such a comfortable read. And heartfelt not only because Paton Walsh has such respect for Lord Peter (whom she has called "the best company who has ever lived in my inner world"), but because she, like Dorothy L. Sayers, portrays murder as a tragedy and a waste, and its perpetrator as a damaged person who has lost a moral compass.

Purists might find it annoying that Paton Walsh writes with a more modern sensibility, by which I mean that even if Sayers had written a Wimsey/Vane book in the 1950s, when this one is set, she almost certainly wouldn't have included a reference to the couple spending a romantic afternoon in bed, and she wouldn't have had Bunter sitting down at the table with Peter and Harriet. But I'm not a purist and I'm not bothered by these scenes, which are a very minor part of the novel anyway.

I do have some small quibbles. There is a large group of college fellows who are part of the plot and it isn't always easy to keep them straight or remember who is on which side of the manuscript controversy. Bunter isn't as much a part of the detection work as in the Sayers books, and I felt his relative absence. The poetry-quoting and learned banter between Peter and Harriet felt less natural and lively than it does in the Sayers books. But I didn't find these quibbles detracted much from the pleasure of the book.

Is this as good a read as a Dorothy L. Sayers original in the Lord Peter/Harriet Vane series?  I'd say certainly not as good as Strong Poison, Gaudy Night or Busman's Honeymoon, but better than Have His Carcase. But since we're not ever going to get more Dorothy L. Sayers books, I'm happy to have Jill Paton Walsh's books. And this is the best of them so far.

Note: I received an advance reviewing copy of this book. Versions of this review may appear on other reviewing sites under my usernames there.