Book Review of Kerry Greenwood's Unnatural Habits

Unnatural Habits by Kerry Greenwood

On her way out for cocktails in the iffy Melbourne neighborhood called Little Lon, Phryne Fisher rescues a young woman who is about to be attacked by three menacing thugs. The woman, Polly Kettle, tells Phryne she is a reporter on a hot story about three young, unmarried, pregnant women who disappeared from a nursing home where they were waiting to deliver their babies. During most of their pregnancy, the women had been made to atone for their sins by being forced to work in the Magdalen Laundry at the Abbotsford convent.

The day after the Little Lon adventure, Polly is kidnapped, and Phryne's friend, police detective Jack Robinson, asks Phryne to help find Polly, since Phryne is better suited to wheedle information from the brothelkeepers Polly had been asking about the missing women. Phryne's investigation takes her from the brothels to the slum home of one of the victims, to the (worse yet, to Phryne) middle-class homes of other victims, to the nightmarish Magdalen Laundry, and more. Even for the normally unflappable Phryne, what she learns about what can happen to unprotected young women is shocking and disheartening.

Although this story has as much verve as any Phryne Fisher novel, it tackles serious subjects in an affecting way. Young women who became pregnant in the 1920s were often rejected by their families and forced to go into unpaid servitude in convents, working in dreadful conditions and subject to whatever discipline the nuns wished to apply. Women had few legal rights and protections and could lose their freedom in many ways, as illustrated vividly in this novel. Phryne can't right all the wrongs of Melbourne society, but she's determined to help as many women as she can and, almost as important, mete out rough and suitable justice to their victimizers.

I confess that whenever I read a Phryne Fisher mystery (this is the 19th in the series), I squirm a little, because Phryne is just too good to be true. She's rich, beautiful, brilliant, able to outwit any villain and conquer any opponent. She collects devoted friends and dependents (doctors, society do-gooders, cabmen, wharfies, street urchins, assorted denizens of the demimonde; you name it) who enthusiastically become part of her detective team. Whenever Phryne needs help, there is always somebody ready to hand with the necessary resources who is eager to spring into action. Her allure is so overwhelming that even her lover's wife is her friend. And anyone who opposes her fears her––or is taught to fear her. Could there be such a superwoman today, let alone 90 years ago?

What I have to remind myself is that the Phryne character is a feminist fantasy figure, wielding a sword of social justice. And what's wrong with that? James Bond is a fantasy figure (of a different sort, obviously!) and nobody seems to mind that one bit. So I resolve to go with the flow and enjoy this fantasy figure and her fantasy life––which, in this book as always, includes colorful, extra-legal and oh-so-deserved punishments for bad guys; socialist workers who treat Phryne as a valued comrade; and hookers with hearts of gold.

Speaking of fantasy, this novel continues the Phryne tradition of lots of descriptions of period clothes, perfumes, hairstyles and, best of all, food and drink. I'm always heading for the refrigerator and liquor cabinet when I read a Phryne Fisher book. This time around, we're told of a classic book, Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks, by William Terrington, published in London in 1869. Take a look at the book here. This is one peculiar recipe book. Here's one of the recipes:

Ponche á la Parisienne: Boil 1/2 pint of water and 1 lb. of sugar; when it comes to the thread, add the oleo-saccharum of 1 lemon [I've discovered that is a sweet oil made from citrus peel and sugar] and juice of 2, 1-1/2 pint of brandy, and 1/2 pint of rum; let this heat, but not boil; pour it in a hot bowl; set fire to it; stir it well, and pour into glasses while blazing.

I think I'll choose a more traditional Phryne favorite, like a White Lady (2 oz. gin, 1/2 oz. Cointreau, 1/2 oz. lemon juice and 1 egg white, shaken with ice and strained into a chilled cocktail glass). I suggest you do the same and raise a glass to what might be the best Phryne Fisher book of the series to date.

Unnatural Habits will be published in hardcover by Poisoned Pen Press on January 1, 2013. It is currently available in audiobook form from Audible.com.

Note: I received a free publisher's review copy of Unnatural Habits. A version of this review may appear on Amazon and other sites under my user names there.

Visiting Old Friends

After 12 consecutive days of sweltering heat and humidity, interspersed with violent nighttime thunderstorms, my brain feels like an egg that's been slowly fried and dried on a dashboard. And we're among the lucky ones; neighbors a few miles to the south have been without power for almost a week. In conditions like this, my TBR pile looks intimidating and unappetizing. I want familiar, comforting amusement, preferably with gelato. Lots of gelato.

The 3Cs (crafting, cooking, and coffeehouse) genres, once favorite light reads, have been so flooded recently with bland, generic stories and characters that I've rather lost interest in them. Many of them feature airhead protagonists (and why are they always women?) who frequently require rescuing from their own nosy stupidity. The second time that I want to shake a heroine until her teeth rattle I put the book down for good. Life is too short for that!

Kerry Greenwood's Corinna Chapman series, about an accountant-turned-baker, came as a welcome exception to this general dumbing-down of the genre. Corinna owns and operates Earthly Delights, a small bakery in center city Melbourne, Australia. It is located on the first floor of the Insula, a quirky apartment building designed like an ancient Roman villa. Corinna used the buyout from her accounting job to purchase both the bakery and her apartment, named (not numbered) Hebe, directly above it. She lives with her house cat Horatio, and has two volunteer stray cats that do rodent patrols in the bakery at night.

Corinna operates her bakery with only some part-time counter help, so her days are long. In Earthly Delights, the first of the series, she opens her bakery door early one morning to let her rodent police, Heckle and Jekyll, out and finds a young girl dying in the street, apparently of a drug overdose. While Corinna's quick response saves the girl, similar drug-related deaths begin to occur around the city. Meanwhile, Corinna and her neighbors in the Insula are being harassed by an anonymous religious fanatic, who leaves threatening letters and defaces and damages the shops. While this series has a wonderful cozy feel to it, there is some rough language––it is the inner city, after all––and some sweet, not-too-explicit sex. Corinna and her community remind me of Armistead Maupin's characters in Tales of the City; bittersweet and very funny. I was so enchanted by the setting, characters, and sly Australian humor in Earthly Delights that I have ordered the rest of the series.

When sexton Willie Boyd of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church is found dead in the choir loft (having spewed all over the keyboards of the organ in the process), Chief Detective Hayden Konig suspects poison. It was poison, but the bottle of sacramental wine Willie had filched and drunk, the only thing he is known to have consumed, is not the source. Many people disliked Willie, including the new priest, Mother Lorraine Ryan, whom many Church members find almost as disagreeable as Willie.

While suspects in Mark Schweizer's The Alto Wore Tweed are plentiful, clues are sparse, and the motive remains a mystery. This novella is interspersed with chapters from Hayden's unfortunate efforts to write a mystery novel in the style of his hero, Raymond Chandler. He has gone so far as to acquire one of the master's manual typewriters in the hope that it will inspire him.

But the Chandleresque story Hayden is writing, while amusing, is not nearly as exciting as the real-life events this autumn in rural North Carolina. The escape of the helium-filled life-sized naked dolls on their way to a bachelor party has dire consequences right through Christmas. And the competing Live Christmas Nativity Displays (one with amorous camel) create such an uproar that it's a wonder Hayden can finally solve his case. This wonderful bit of slapstick mystery is the first in a series, and to my mind still the best.

Brat Farrar, by Josephine Tey, is one of those classic mysteries I return to every few years. Brat, who ran away from a London orphanage, wound up in the American West, where he broke and trained horses and hoped for a career in rodeo. A leg injury ended those hopes, so he returned to Britain to bitterly reconsider a bleak, horseless future. There, a chance encounter with an out-of-work actor, who confuses him with a young neighbor believed drowned by suicide years earlier, offers him an opportunity he could never have dreamed.

Alec Loding swears that Brat is the image of the late Patrick Ashby, whose body was never recovered. Patrick, who would have inherited the lovely little horse farm of Latchetts on his upcoming 21st birthday. Whose reckless spendthrift brother, Simon, will inherit the farm––unless Patrick returns. Loding wants to pass Brat off as Patrick, in return for a very modest income, which the estate can easily afford. After much agonizing, Brat takes on the criminal challenge––and the new identity. Alec, who grew up with Patrick and Simon, coaches Brat so thoroughly that even the family lawyer is convinced before sending "Patrick" down to Latchetts to be reunited with his family.

Tey was fascinated by moral and ethical dilemmas, and often put her characters into situations that tested their limits severely. Brat is a basically honest young man caught up in an increasingly intolerable trap of his own making, until the fiction he struggles to maintain smashes against the reality of murder. No humor here, but a story and a mood that linger pleasantly. Maybe next week the weather will break, and the TBR pile will toss up something interesting. Until then, it's nice to have some old friends at hand to revisit.

Beach Reads from the Material Witnesses

Happy Independence Day, everyone! It's the day we celebrate the founding of our country, but let's face it: July 4th is also the unofficial kickoff of real summer. (Despite the fact that the nation's average temperature the last week of June was already about a thousand degrees.) Summer makes some people think about barbecues, baseball and swimsuits. We think about those things, too, but most of all we think about summer reading.

Reading at the beach is one of the best treats I give myself. If I have plenty of time––which happens on those occasions when I am lucky enough to be staying by the ocean––what I enjoy most is a longer story that can really take me away. The moronic part of this is that I already am where I want to be; go figure. But a book like Amagansett, by Mark Mills, takes me away in time and place, but still keeps me by an ocean.

Eastern Long Island in 1947 is that distant location. It begins one fine day in July. Conrad Labarde, a Basque fisherman, and his partner, Rollo, are hauling in their net along the beach, but the familiar twitch of the line is absent. And where are the pulls and tugs against the twine, or a flicker of a surface break? They both know that they have an inert load beneath the pewter skin of the sea, and there is nothing else to do but bring it in. It is what they hoped it wasn't: a corpse; a dead woman, still beautiful, but sea-washed and deceptively peaceful looking.

The setting for this mystery is the south fork of Long Island at Amagansett, near East Hampton and not far from the easternmost part of New York, Montauk Point.

The power of this story comes from the depths of the characters and their backgrounds. Conrad Labarde, who served in an elite unit during World War II, impressed me but, like most veterans of that conflict, he never spoke of his wartime experiences––except for one time. He said war showed that you aren't one thing or another, but all things at the same time; i.e., brave, cowardly, and selfless, but also cruel, compassionate and heartless. The only question is, which bit of you would show up next?

Right Whale

This book brought back memories of my own of a visit to Montauk Point with friends in the early '60s, and watching the breakers of the Atlantic crash on the shore as we looked out from what seemed like land's end. Mills also uses the language of the sea beautifully, and it was like a foreign, but lyrical, language to me as he spoke of longshore sets turning and right whales bound east'rd inside the bar. I loved it.

Most of the time I am not alone at the beach, and I have to pull my nose out of my reading to be social. On these occasions, the best read is my trusty Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine or Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. I received the new issue of the latter a few days ago in the mail. It includes short stories by Martin Limón and Georgette Heyer, two of my favorite authors. Heyer's story is a classic called "Night at the Inn." I can't wait to read these.

This year, for the first time ever, I don't plan to take a suitcase full of books to the beach or on trips. Instead, I will plastic-bag my e-reader and take an entire library! My favorite beach reads are usually light. Sun, surf, and beachcombing don't mix well with 800-page tomes that require much concentration. I fall asleep! A recent email from a favorite mid-list publisher listing summer price reductions and first-in-series freebies introduced me to several interesting, new-to-me detectives who seem like ideal company for long, lazy afternoons dabbling my feet in the surf.

Sister MM first introduced me to Kerry Greenwood's sophisticated flapper Phryne Fisher awhile ago, but I hadn't had a chance to follow up on the acquaintance until now. I have downloaded several books in that series, as well as three of another of Greenwood's series featuring Corinna Chapman, a contemporary accountant-turned-baker in Melbourne, Australia. That should keep me in cozies––and in Australia for awhile. It's the only way I'll get there, at least this year!

In the line of things I'd rather read about than do, a starred review in Publishers Weekly compared John R. Corrigan's Bad Lie to "Robert B. Parker and Dick Francis at their best." When the father of the protegé of PGA pro and sleuth, Jack Austin, is brutally murdered, Austin jeopardizes his career to find the killer in this fair-play noir mystery. Hmm, if it's half as good as Francis, I'll enjoy it.

Chris Cleave's Gold was released July 3, and features cyclists in this summer's Olympics in London. Very timely. Then I'll need one good long meaty book to dip in and out of for continuity. Revolutionary history is an interest, so I may try David A. Clary's Adopted Son: Washington, Lafayette, and the Friendship the Saved the Revolution. The story is told largely in letters between the two, and reading other peoples' mail sounds just right for a bit of summer snooping.

It's still up in the air, though. Any recommendations?

Not too many classic British mysteries would be considered beach reads, but I just read one: Michael Gilbert's Anything For a Quiet Life. Successful, middle-aged solicitor, Jonas Pickett, decides he's saved enough money from his north London practice to support him for the rest of his life, and that qualifies him for semi-retirement somewhere more relaxing. He takes himself off to Shackleford, a quiet beach town not far from Brighton, and sets up a practice that he hopes will only be successful enough to keep him from getting bored.

Picket has his acerbic secretary, Claire, his super-competent but somewhat contrary partner, Mrs. Mountjoy, and his general factotum (and occasional bodyguard) Sam, all of whom sometimes seem to be conspiring to turn the new practice into a full-time job. So what makes this a beach read? Well, it's set at the seaside, for one thing. Better yet, it's a collection of nine interconnected stories, each of which can be read in about the time one's attention span usually lasts when reading on the beach. Michael Gilbert's dry humor is in good supply, the stories are entertaining and not too mentally taxing, the good guys are vindicated and the bad guys vanquished. What's not to like?

I know some people like to take a big brick of a book on vacation and chip away at it day by day. I've got one of those to recommend too, this one in the thriller genre. It's Neal Stephenson's Reamde. Russian gangsters, Chinese hackers, Islamic terrorists and bears (oh my!) are just a few of the perils facing Zula Forthrast in this hyper-modern version of The Wizard of Oz. Well, that is, it's a version of The Wizard of Oz if you go along for the ride with a Dorothy (Zula) who is an Eritrean orphan refugee adopted and raised by an Iowa farm family, a Wicked Witch who is a black, Welsh, university-educated Islamic terrorist named Abdullah Jones, and a set of Dorothy sidekicks that includes a couple of Chinese 20-somethings, a huge and hairy Hungarian computer whiz and a retired Russian soldier-turned-"security expert."

Throw in a massive multiplayer online game called T'Rain, various methods of computer and internet wizardry, agents from MI-6, survivalists, a lot of extremely violent action sequences, and locations ranging from Xiamen (China), Iowa, Seattle, British Columbia, the Philippines, and London, and you've got a ride like a beachfront roller coaster.

Could it have been shorter? Definitely. Just for starters, I could have lived without a level of detail so extreme that it includes a discussion of the psychological implications involved in whether a secondary character adjusts his car seat. And it's not as if the book is nearly as impressive as Stephenson's Cryptonomicon or the Baroque Cycle, or has the kind of grand themes they have.

Yet, amidst all the shoot-'em-up action, there is a deeper meaning. It's in the way so many people care enough about others to risk their lives to help a young woman whom many of them had never previously met, and to defeat the murderous plans of nihilistically brutal terrorists. But even if you take it as just a nonstop action/adventure with a large cast of eccentric, but engaging, characters, and go along for the ride, it's a whole lot of fun.

Note: Versions of my reviews appear on the Amazon product page under my Amazon user name.

Pismo Beach, California

Reading at the beach is routine for me, because I live on California's Central Coast, minutes away from several beaches. Even so, any time I can read with the crash of waves in my ears and the grit of sand between my toes is a pleasure.

Parallel Stories, written by Péter Nádas and translated into English from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein, is my suggestion to people who relax with Proust or Thomas Mann, but who also love crime fiction. At 1150 pages, it's definitely literary fiction you can sink your teeth into. It opens in Berlin when the Wall is cracking. A body, half-buried in the snow, is found. The protagonists are three men who served as Communist spies in the West; their stories parallel and link to each other from the spring of 1939 to 1989. I'm reading it now and enjoying it very much.

If you liked Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize winner, Wolf Hall, you should take the 2012 sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, and stuff it in with your beach blanket and sunscreen. It's Cromwell's take (fictionalized, of course) on Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII. Not a happy ending for poor Anne, but a great read.

Peregrine falcons nest on Morro Rock so no climbing is allowed

Like rollicking tales of adventure while you're basking in the sun? Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road features the Frankish apothecary Zelikman, a "fair-haired scarecrow from some fogbound land," and Amram, an Abyssinian ex-soldier, whose air of stillness "trumpeted his murderous nature to all but the greenest travelers on this minor spur of the Silk Road." In A.D. 950, Zelikman and Amram escort a prince of the Khazar Empire over the Silk Route to Atil to reclaim his throne. These characters are straight outta central casting for the Arabian Nights, and their tale is sheer entertainment. Perfect for reading aloud.

Elephant seals in Morro Bay

I've found that summer books can be particularly relaxing if I read in unexpected directions; say, a sure-fire air conditioner such as Ice Run, by Steve Hamilton. It's set in frigid mid-winter in Paradise, Michigan, but ex-cop Alex McKnight's heart isn't feeling the chill. He has fallen in love with Canadian cop Natalie Reynaud, and this will cause him a world of trouble. Or, whisk from the beach to barmy horror like Jeffrey E. Barlough's Dark Sleeper, a Dickensian tale set during the Second Ice Age in the port city of Salthead, which is very much like Victorian London if you include mastodons and saber-toothed cats. It is the home of metaphysician Titus Vespasianus Tiggs and his associate, Dr. Daniel Dampe, who operate like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. They're needed on a case of spectral images haunting Salthead's residents––a headless drowned sailor, a ghost ship, and a rabid mastiff. Or, from the sanity of your blanket on the sand, question your ideas about identity and paranoia with David Czuchlewski's The Muse Asylum. Andrew Wallace and The Manhattan Ledger's Jake Burnett are former Princeton classmates once tied by their interest in the same woman. Now Jake tries to track down the reclusive author Horace Jacob Little, while his old classmate Andrew, confined to a psychiatric facility, writes confessions about his own interactions with Little.

I should reserve a spot in my beach bag for Mark Mills's Amagansett. I bet my husband and I would both like it. Space limitations mean we often share books while on summer vacation. Our last shared saga was 950+ pages: John Sayles's A Moment in the Sun. (Yes, the indie filmmaker also writes good books. His first, Pride of the Bimbos, is about a traveling circus baseball team that plays in drag and stars a midget. Believe it.) A Moment in the Sun is set shortly before the end of the 1800s and reminded me of E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime in the mix of real and fictional characters, the scope of its story, themes and connections between seemingly disparate characters. Reamde sounds like another big feast we'd enjoy.

In August, we're going to the lake. I want to take a genre bender, Quantum Thief by Finnish author Hannu Rajaniemi. Publishers Weekly says that "Rajaniemi melds a caper novel, New Wave aesthetics, and theoretical physics into a stellar debut. Broken out of a quantum prison in which he'd been forced to play endless games of prisoner's dilemma, often against himself, master thief Jean le Flambeur is forced to take a job working for the mysterious and beautiful Mieli. They travel to Oubliette, a moving city on Mars where time and memory are quantifiable and transferrable goods, and privacy is paramount." Whew. I like traveling to other places from my beach towel and Mars would be a trip.

My husband's choice for our August vacation? Adam Brent Houghtaling's This Will End in Tears: The Miserabilist Guide to Music. It's due to be published on August 7. It's a comprehensive tour through sad music of all kinds. Doesn't that sound like fun? As an antidote I'm going to pack our most cheerful CDs.

I'm copying a page from Sister Mary's playbook and taking some classic English mysteries. If they're set at the seashore or the characters are on vacation, that's a plus. One example I've already read is P. M. Hubbard's High Tide. It features a man, Curtis, just released from prison where he was serving a sentence for manslaughter. Curtis is taking a trip when he's waylaid and asked about his victim's last words. He doesn't remember then, but later he does. They were: "High tide at ___." Curtis wonders if this means something that may be to his advantage, so he investigates––and so, unfortunately, do some villains. Beautiful coastal cliffs of Devon setting. Hubbard writes books that stick in the mind like sand in your wet swimming suit.

Another classic English mystery for vacation reading is Suicide Excepted, by Cyril Hare. Every year, an elderly Englishman makes the same trek that ends in the same room in the same hotel. One year, his vacation ends with his death in the same hotel bed. The police and coroner rule it a suicide. His children initiate their own amateur investigation when the insurance company refuses to pay on his policy. A drunken private eye and Inspector Mallett are also on hand. Like all of Hare's books, it's a little dry but very wonderful––like a martini.

I've taken P. G. Wodehouse to the lake in the past, and enjoyed the company of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster by the water. Robert Barnard and Carl Hiaasen are good, too. I like reading James Swain books about gambling during the day. His Mr. Lucky is Ricky Smith, who wins half a million at a casino in Las Vegas, scratches a winning lottery card, successfully bets long shots in a horse race at Belmont Park, and wins a vacation when ping pong balls are drawn out of a hat at a local celebration. The Las Vegas casino finds it impossible to believe in luck of this magnitude and hires Tony Valentine, an expert at detecting gambling fraud, to investigate. It's unfortunate that Valentine can't improve my poker when we play with friends in the cabin at night. You could call me Ms. Unlucky with a deck of cards.

Have you ever struck it lucky with some books you've taken to the beach? If so, we're all eyes and ears.

Sweetheart Sleuths Unveiled

Answers to Sweethearts Sleuths Quiz of Tuesday, February 14th

1. Lady Emily Ashton is Colin Hargreaves' fiancée in Tasha Alexander's historical mystery series that begins with And Only To Deceive.

2. Albert Campion's heart is captured by Amanda Pontisbright, who later becomes his wife. She first appears in Sweet Danger, the fifth in Margery Allingham's Campion series.

3. Detective Inspector Gemma James is married to Scotland Yard Superintendant Duncan Kincaid in Deborah Crombie's current novels, but in the first of the series, A Share in Death, she is just his eager assistant.

4. Alan Markby meets his love interest, Meredith Mitchell, in the first of Ann Granger's Mitchell and Markby series. She is a family member of the murderee in Say it with Poison.

5. Corinna Chapman, the baker and owner of Earthly Delights, a bakery in Melbourne, Australia, has the delight of Daniel Cohen in her life. This is the second series written by Kerry Greenwood. Cohen is ex-Israeli commando turned helper to the lost in Melbourne.

6. Rina Lazarus lives in wedded bliss with LAPD Detective Lieutenant Peter Decker in a series written by Faye Kellerman. The latest in this series is Gun Games.

7. Cop Charlie Piotrowski has needed Cupid's help to attract Professor Karen Pelletier in the Joanne Dobson series about an English Professor at Enfield College in Massachusetts.

8. Carol Jordan is a Detective Chief Inspector who hooks up with Dr. Tony Hill, a forensic psychologist and profiler in Val McDermid's series, which takes place in northern England. Their latest outing is The Retribution.

9. Chief Inspector Danny Lloyd is attracted to Inspector Judy Hill in Jill McGown's series, which takes place in East Anglia, England.

10. Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn meets the love of his life, Agatha Troy, while on vacation in Ngaio Marsh's Artists in Crime. There is an in-depth report later in this blog post.

11. Desiree Mitry is a Connecticut State Police Lieutenant who meets Mitch Berger, a film critic, in David Handler's A Cold Blue Blood.

12. Bill Smith is an army brat Private Investigator who partners with Lydia Chin in New York City to solve crimes. This series written by S.J. Rozan whose 2011 Ghost Hero is a finalist for the Dilys Award.

13. Harriet Vane is pursued by ardent amateur sleuth Sir Peter Wimsey through many volumes before she finally consents to be his Valentine. But when it comes to romance, the circumstances surrounding Strong Poison, the book in which these characters meet, do not give this couple an ideal start. Harriet Vane is on trial for murder at the time!

14. Sheriff Walt Longmire and Victoria Moretti are cops and  potential lovers in the wonderful Craig Johnson series based in Absaroka County, Wyoming. Their latest adventure is Hell Must be Empty and since I have not read it yet, for all I know they are still dancing the tango.

Ngaio Marsh's Artists in Crime

This is an example of how one couple still managed to get together even though they first meet under very inauspicious circumstances.



Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn has been having a long holiday in New Zealand, which turned out to be a busman's holiday, as chronicled in Vintage Murder. He has taken the long way home, starting with an ocean cruise that stopped at ports in Fiji, Hawaii and, lastly, San Francisco. While in the port of Suva, Fiji, his eye is caught by a lovely young artist, Agatha Troy. She is sitting on a lifeboat trying to capture the harbor scene. They seem to strike sparks off each other, so they avoid each other all the way from the ocean liner to the wonderful trip across Canada on the Canadian Pacific railroad.

Agatha Troy is going back to a household of art students whom she is to teach for the next several weeks. Alleyn, who still has some few days of leave left, is going to spend some time with his mother. These households are somewhat close to each other.

This is a motley crew of artists at Tatler's End, Troy,s home. The students and the model settle in for the painting of a recumbent nude. As with all artistic people, there are some disturbances, but the greatest of these is the murder of the vivacious young model. Since Alleyn is staying in the vicinity, he is asked to go to Tatler's End to investigate. Alleyn is not sure about this case because he really wants to follow his heart, which tells him that the woman he is falling in love with cannot possibly be a murderer. His head, on the other hand, is very well trained and he has associates who will keep his mind on the job.

Tatler's End

The cast of suspects is large, with so many people in the house, and much of the story revolves around who was where and when, then who left and at what time, and the merry-go-round typical of some classic mysteries. My eyes did glaze over once or twice with the recounting over and again of time schedules and itineraries.

All's well that ends well––except for the model who was, in any case, walking a perilous line. Readers of Marsh know that Alleyn and Troy are made for each other and are together in future books, so this is a delightful introduction to their relationship.

This cartoon from the New Yorker may represent all of our couples in the later years of their relationship.