Better Off Dead

Write what you know is an exhortation (attributed to Mark Twain) to all who put pen to paper––or voice to Siri. There is some debate about what this really means, but I take it at face value. One of my favorite sub-genres, if there is such a word, is writers writing about writers and, even better, mystery authors writing about people in their own line of work. They give a little insight into the process of creating memorable characters and their dastardly deeds.

In Stop Press, by Michael Innes, written in 1939, Timothy Eliot is an undergraduate at Oxford with an uneasy mind as the end of the year approaches, and he comes to Professor Gerald Winter for some help. Timmy feels that his father, Richard Eliot, is headed for the loony bin.

Mr. Richard Eliot is a well-known writer of 30-odd books revolving around the exploits of a character known as "the Spider." The Spider began his adventures as a master crook but, over the years, morphed into a dashing detective. The Spider belongs to that class of sleuths who are of ample means, debonair personality and a bit smarter than the police. Recently, however, because of some unusual occurrences in the region of Rust Hall, the Eliot family manor, Mr. Eliot has been wondering if the Spider has come alive.

To be specific there was a burglary that resembled one the Spider had thought of––but that plot was only imagined by Mr. Eliot; never published. Other events occur in the same vein, increasing Mr. Eliot's anxiety. As Timmy would have it, "it was as if the inanimate seeming husk of his father’s books had trembled and cracked, and from the chrysalis there had struggled a living thing."

Coming up at Rust Hall is the annual celebration that the publisher puts on for the Spider's birthday. This year is to be a special occasion, because the Spider has turned 21. Many people are descending on the manor, including other writers, translators, an actor who reprises the role of the Spider on the screen, and many others. Timmy is convinced there will be trouble over the weekend and asks his tutor, Mr. Winter, to come along as well.

Timmy has an older sister, Belinda, who works at nearby Rust Manor with her friend, Patricia Appleby, who is also invited for the weekend. Throughout the course of the first evening, Patricia picks up on some vibes, as several Spider-like rather cruel jokes are played on the guests––and she fears worse is to come. She sends out an SOS to her brother, John Appleby, a chief inspector at Scotland Yard, to come as soon as he can.

Appleby arrives in a dramatic fashion, after all of the lights of the manor were suddenly extinguished as if by magic, and the party was smothered by a frightening darkness. Appleby fixes the lighting problem with the aid of a flashlight and fuse because after all, electrical problems were quite common in old houses in those pre-World War II years. He joins the house party, because he is intrigued by the puzzle. Somehow, someone is privy to the inner thoughts and plots of an author who guarded his secrets carefully, and who furthermore claims that the prankster  has becomes more menacing, as he is now also having thoughts involving the Spider that never entered Mr. Eliot's mind.

John Innes Mackintosh Stewart was born in Scotland, educated at Oxford––like his protagonist––and taught English at many universities. He was a great scholar, and his erudition comes across in his writing. He is the only author I read regularly who uses words I have to look up every few pages. A few of my favorites from this volume were congeries, meaning collections or aggregations; and gnomic, meaning mysterious and often incomprehensible, yet seemingly wise. Nothing to do with eels or gnomes. Innes is such a wordsmith that some sentences are crafted to have a fuller meaning after the words sink in and settle for a bit. Speed-reading will not do for this author.

The peek behind the curtain in this novel is when a character in Stop Press elucidates what makes mysteries successful. For example: "everything is subject to the rules, which the reader knows. There is generally a puzzle that the reader can solve by means of the rules and that implies that in the little universe of the book the reader is the master.  The books cater for the need of security. Real life is horribly insecure because God is capable of keeping a vital rule or two up his sleeve and giving us unpleasant surprises as a result. The author Mr. Eliot, the author isn't allowed to do that. When we figure out the puzzles we get a pleasant sense of intellectual superiority. Knowing the rules we can control them if we want to." Dare we presume that this is how Innes feels as well?

Robert Barnard, a prolific author all of whose works I hope to read eventually, takes several different pokes at the profession of writing. In Death of a Mystery Writer, he targets the aptly-named Sir Oliver Fairleigh-Stubbs, a rotund best-selling mystery novelist who is despised by all who know him, because he is an overbearing bully. His books are quite enjoyable, even though readers never feel they can admit their admiration of the author in public. When the author is murdered, there are almost too many suspects. The plot is further enlivened by a missing-manuscript mystery.

On the romance front, Barnard sent his protagonist, Perry Trethowan, to Norway in The Cherry Blossom Corpse, where he accompanies his sister to a Romantic Novelists convention. Trethowan expected chilly weather, fanciful authors and flowery language. He never expected that beneath the facade of these writers, mostly ladies, there would be such malice; back-biting and bitter rivalry lead to the murder of one of the group.

A Hovering of Vultures is the sad tale of the death of a pair of literary writers whose tomes were so dreary that the shocking details of their last moments gave them more acclaim than their lives' work. Barnard's Charlie Peace tackled this case. Read all about it here.

Another novelist who seems to think fictional writers are better off dead is G. M. Malliet. In her Death of a Cozy Writer, there is an Agatha Christie-like gathering during which a wealthy, successful cozy mystery writer––who is also the pits as a human being––meets his fate while a storm blankets the house with snow. Cornish detective Detective Chief Inspector St. Just and his partner, Detective Sergeant Fear, search for Colonel Mustard and the candlestick. Humor and plot twists keep the book alive.

In Death and the Lit Chick, Malliet lampoons mystery writers again, with the sharpest point needling the wildly successful young author of the chick lit mystery. Along with Kimberlee Kalder, there is a group of writers at a Scottish castle where St. Just happens to be staying. The rivals for the bestseller rankings are damsel-in-distress novels (that are fading in popularity with the reading public), spy thrillers (as dated as the Berlin Wall), dark-and-edgy novels (with no edge), and a weird detective story set in prehistoric times. The castle is surrounded by the traditional moat, the drawbridge is up, the lights go out during a storm and, you guessed it, a certain mystery author turns up dead, presenting St. Just with a murder to solve.

I am intrigued by the turnabout where writers of the past are being brought to fictional life, putting on gumshoes and donning deerstalker hats. Several late authors are solving mysteries in their own series. Dorothy Parker is known for being part of New York's famous Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s, a regular gathering of authors, critics and others in the book trade whose barbed witticisms led to their other nickname, the "Vicious Circle." In the first of his mysteries featuring Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table group, author J. J. Murphy turns Dorothy into a Nosey Parker when she discovers a body under the round table who is dead as a doornail, not dead drunk. I might give this series a try.

There are several other real-life authors who have turned into fictional sleuths. Nicola Upson has resurrected Josephine Tey and put her to work. Gyles Brandreth has revitalized Oscar Wilde's wit and personality and recreated him as a sleuth with great success. And, finally, Jane Austen has crawled out of her grave again to put clues together and solve crimes in Stephanie Barron’s series.

All of these stories, in their way, let us know a bit about what authors think of their craft. For some reason, I seem to find books with the authors as victims a bit more enlightening. They give me an appreciation of what an author has to deal with when it comes to the public, publishers and publicity, and the problem of protagonists they are tired of but who are still their bread and butter. They all face the changing times and mores as we do and must make interesting stories out of them.

Cleaning House

I hate housework. Not with a seething, white-hot hatred or a disdain so profound that I refuse to do any house cleaning, but I do admit that my primary motivation when I clean is to avoid embarrassment if a neighbor drops in. Though, if somebody comes by when things look particularly bad, I could always pull a Phyllis Diller and say: "Who could have done this? We don't have any enemies."

Phyllis Diller (may she rest in peace) also wisely said: "Housework can't kill you, but why take a chance?" Now that I think about it, though, Erma Bombeck's reply to Diller was that if you do it right, housework can kill you. As a mystery reader, I'd put a slight twist on that and say that housework done wrong can kill––somebody. (Warning: spoilers of a couple of well-known classics are included in this post.)

In 1960, Peg Bracken wrote The I Hate To Cook Book. Bracken was clearly a mystery lover; she includes a recipe for Nero Wolfe's eggs, and a slow-cooking stew recipe for those days when you want to abandon household chores and stay in bed reading a good murder mystery. But no matter how much she hated to cook, Bracken didn't kill anybody with her cookery––unlike some people.

In Dorothy L. Sayers's Strong Poison, Lord Peter Wimsey struggles to clear Harriet Vane of murdering her former lover, Philip Boyes, with arsenic. Wimsey's challenge is to figure out how anyone other than Harriet could have slipped the arsenic to Boyes, whose last meal was one in which he shared all the food and drink with his cousin. The answer to Wimsey's challenge: a clever and deadly way of making an omelet.

Nine years after the publication of Strong Poison, Agatha Christie penned a new Hercule Poirot book, called Sad Cypress, that seems to have been inspired by the earlier Sayers book. Christie's main character is a young woman in the dock for murder by poison when a man falls in love with her and is determined to save her by proving her innocence. As if that's not similar enough to Strong Poison, the man's name is Peter Lord! Beyond those similarities, the stories are very different, though. Christie's sleuth is, of course, Hercule Poirot, not Peter––and a good thing, too, since Christie's Peter seems to have only a fraction of the little grey cells of Poirot or Wimsey.

In Roald Dahl's short story, "Lamb to the Slaughter," Mary Maloney is a pregnant housewife whose police detective husband, Patrick, comes home from work and tells her he's leaving her. In a state of shock, Mary goes through the motions of dinner preparation. When she brings a large, frozen leg of lamb into the kitchen, Patrick tells her not to bother, as he's going out. His disdain jolts Mary from shock to outrage and she whacks him with the leg of lamb, killing him.

Clever Mary then puts the lamb into the oven, heads off to the grocery store to give herself an alibi and then goes home to "discover" the body. The murder is investigated by Patrick's work friends, who never suspect Mary and spend their time looking for the blunt object that obviously killed Patrick. When they point out that the roast seems to be finished, Mary invites them to eat it. As they eat, one detective remarks that the murder weapon is probably right under their noses. Too right!

In Busman's Honeymoon, the last of the Lord Peter Wimsey books, Dorothy L. Sayers shows a preoccupation with the perils of housekeeping. When Lord Peter and his new bride, Harriet, arrive at Talboys, the old house they've purchased in the village Harriet knew as a girl, they are surprised that nothing has been done to ready the place for them, as had been agreed. Bunter and the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Ruddle, have to hurry to clean up, prepare the beds and light the lamps and the fire.

The next day, a recalcitrant chimney blocked with "sut," as Mr. Puffet the chimney sweep calls it, causes a domestic disaster. Wanting to be helpful, the vicar fires a shotgun up the chimney to knock out the blockage, which has the effect of causing an avalanche of dead animals, bric-a-brack and clinkers to crash to the hearth and a gigantic cloud of ash to choke the room. More cleaning required! The day goes from bad to worse when a trip to the cellar on a domestic errand results in an unpleasant find: the corpse of the house's previous owner.

Housework even plays a role in the solution to the crime in Busman's Honeymoon. That chimney mishap dislodges a clue, and it turns out that a regular domestic chore is the key to the ingenious murder method. If only a regular domestic chore around my house was integral to something really important. But I suppose cleanliness is its own reward.

Agatha Christie seemed to find an additional reward. She said the best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. I guess I'll just have to take her word for it. I do my best thinking while mowing the lawn, but then I do that while sitting on a tractor. And, as Roseanne Barr used to say, when Sears starts selling a riding vacuum cleaner, then it'll be time to start cleaning house.

Joan Rivers said she hates housework because you make the beds, you wash the dishes and six months later you have to start all over again. Another woman who hates housework is Judith Singer, the Long Island housewife protagonist of Susan Isaacs's first novel, Compromising Positions. Though Judith's inconsiderate husband, Bob, definitely deserves a leg of lamb to the back of the skull, Judith channels her frustrations elsewhere. She investigates the murder of her periodontist, in the process discovering the seamy underbelly of suburbia. An entertaining book was made into an equally delightful movie, starring Susan Sarandon, Raul Julia, Edward Herrmann and Judith Ivey.

Did I mention I hate gardening too? I believe in the old saying that a garden is a thing of beauty and a job forever. Weeding is the most boring, back-breaking job ever. And why is it that it's so hard to pull weeds, but if I accidentally grab a real plant, it pops right out? My favorite thing about winter is that all the snow on the ground makes my garden and landscaping look just as good as my neighbor's.

Our British friends love their gardening, though, and it plays a role in many of their mysteries. In the Christie book I mentioned above, Sad Cypress, the resolution is helped along by a knowledge of rose varieties. (Good thing I wasn't on the case.)

In Reginald Hill's Deadheads, Inspectors Dalziel and Pascoe investigate a series of deaths at the Perfecta Porcelain corporation. Dalziel's old friend, Dick Elgood, an executive at the company, is convinced that its accountant, Patrick Aldermann, is bumping off people to clear a space for his own advancement. Aldermann is an avid rose gardener, who learned all about deadheading roses to make way for more vigorous growth from his great-aunt when he was only a boy. Has he taken the lesson too much to heart?

Even if you skip the hard work of grubbing in the dirt and just appreciate flowers through a visit to London's annual Chelsea Flower Show, that might not be safe enough. In Chelsea Mansions, the eleventh in Barry Maitland's Brock and Kolla police procedural series, Nancy Haynes's dream of coming from the US especially for the show ends violently when, heading back to her hotel after her first afternoon's visit, she is suddenly and inexplicably picked up by a passerby and thrown in front of a bus, killing her. A few days later, a wealthy Russian émigré is killed in his garden. His house is right next door to the small, somewhat rundown hotel where Nancy Haynes had been staying. Are the two deaths connected?

After reading these books, I feel I've been warned off flower gardening and flower shows. I still remember that classic of Catherine Aird's, Passing Strange, in which the village of Almstone's nurse, Joyce Cooper, is strangled at the Horticultural Society Flower Show.

Other garden produce gets into the act in G. M. Malliet's Wicked Autumn, when that battle-ax Wanda Batton-Smyth, head of Nether Monkslips Women's Institute, is bumped off in the middle of the fall Harvest Fayre. I suppose Robert Barnard's Fête Fatale is evidence that it's the gathering, not the gardening, that's the problem. After all, the church fête that is the scene of this book's murder of the new vicar is more about bric-a-brac and baked goods than produce and flowers. But, as with housekeeping, I'm not taking any chances.

As we head into the weekend, I think I'll take a page from Peg Bracken's book and throw something in the slow cooker while I curl up with a good mystery book.

Book Review of A Fatal Winter: A Max Tudor Novel

A Fatal Winter by G.M. Malliet

After her clever and charming update to the classic village cozy murder in Wicked Autumn, the first Max Tudor mystery, author G.M. Malliet moves on to modernize, not the Manor House, but the Manor House murder in A Fatal Winter.

When Nether Monkslip's studly (and single!) vicar Max Tudor, formerly of MI5, meets Lady Leticia Bayard on a train returning from London, he finds her an anachronistic, autocratic bore. But when he learns that evening that she has died, apparently of a heart attack after hearing of her twin brother's murder, he regrets his lack of charity. His slightly guilty conscience and the expressed wish of both brother and sister to be buried from St. Eowald, Max's church, play right into the hands of his friend DCI Cotton, who wants Max on the scene to pick up information about the murder for the police.

Chedrow Castle is a stone medieval manor house built high on a bluff overlooking the sea. It was later walled and fortified on the land side to make it impregnable from all directions. Spy holes built into both exterior and internal walls enabled the lord of the manor to keep an eye out for invasion from without or treachery from within. It was occupied in this generation by Oscar, Lord Footrustle, his twin sister Leticia with her granddaughter Lamorna, and a cook and butler couple. But this year, the manipulative, tight-fisted Oscar had uncharacteristically decided to invite his disparate and far-flung relatives for Christmas. That proved a fatal mistake for both the elderly millionaire and his snobbish sister.

 

Oscar's daughter by his first wife, Jocasta, is getting a little long in the tooth for the ingenue movie roles that earned her modest success in Hollywood. Her younger husband, Simon, hopes to keep her sober and sane enough not to blow the lid off the festivities when she encounters her father's detested second wife Gwynyth and Jocasta's adolescent half-siblings, the "terrible twyns." After the divorce, that dreadful commoner Gwynyth got to keep the title, and her son Alec will be Lord Footrustle after Oscar. But while the title is entailed, Oscar's substantial personal fortune is not.

Like her twin, Lady Bayard also had three children. Her daughter had been killed in an accident, leaving an adopted daughter in her grandmother's care. After trying unsuccessfully to make a "proper" lady of the unattractive and fanatically religious Lamorna, Leticia prudently made use of the twice-orphaned girl as an unpaid lady's maid. Blood will tell, she thought, and Lamorna obviously didn't have the right sort. Randolph, Leticia's plummy oldest (a photographer of the rich and famous) came with his assistant, Cilla Petrie. They had a shoot in the area, and Cilla's makeup skills would certainly be required. Her younger son Lester flew in from Australia with his wife Felberta for the festive family reunion. Lester and Fester, as they are not-so-fondly known in the family, spend many hours surreptitiously assessing and photographing the treasures the castle has accumulated over the generations.

The "twyns," Alec and Amanda, may be the most wholesome characters in this toxic family brew. Cynical and sophisticated beyond their years, they treat their narcissistic mother and grasping relatives alike with even-handed adolescent contempt. They are impressed, however, by Max's MI5 background, and Amanda even offers him a full tour of the castle. While showing him around, she confides that someone might have tried to kill her father earlier, when an ancient piece of stone coping fell, narrowly missing him. Then Oscar alone got an apparent case of food poisoning, much to the careful cook's outrage.

The author offered enough red herrings in this book for a full dinner course, and I obligingly hared off after several of them. There were so many nasty characters that it was hard to pick just one for the murderer. The pieces finally came together for Max in a way reminiscent of Agatha Christie at her best, and a final clever and unanticipated twist kept me guessing right up to the Poirot-esque grand denoument in the library.

Like many second books in a series, A Fatal Winter was not quite as charming as the first. Perhaps it was the collection of Lord Footrustle's relatives who ranged from merely unlikable to outright detestable, or the claustrophobic setting that failed to hold my attention. While this was a quite decent spoof on the classic English Country House murder, with many flashes of the author's trademark sly humor, I missed the colorful and slightly dotty denizens of Nether Monkslip, and hope the author returns to the village for Max's next adventure.

Note: A Fatal Winter was published by Minotaur Books and will be released on October 16. I received a free copy in exchange for this review. Parts of this review appear on Amazon and Goodreads, under my user names there.

Top Reads of 2011

There are certain subjects you know you shouldn't raise in company if you want to avoid unpleasantness. Politics, religion, how to raise children, just for starters. Among the Material Witnesses, one subject is guaranteed to prompt pained howls from Georgette Spelvin: best-books lists. For some reason, she just hates making lists of favorite authors and reads.

I enjoy looking back over the year and thinking about the books I've read and how they stacked up. I keep a notebook of the books I've read, but all I do is write down the author and title. If I really liked it, I put an asterisk next to it. One of my book club friends has a card file and has a comment card in it for every book she's read for the last 30 years or so. I'm not that organized, but I wish I did have a record of every book I'd ever read, except for the part where people would look at me like I was some kind of compulsive nutcase.

But back to the subject at hand. This is the time of year when the newspapers, magazines and websites tell us what were the best books published in the past year. I always look at those lists and consider myself lucky if I've read 20% of them. It makes me feel like a cultural deadbeat, but that somehow doesn't ever seem to result in my rushing out to get the books they rate the highest.

I'm going to list my top reads of this year, more or less in order, and ask our readers to do the same in comments. They don't have to be 2011 publications; just books you read this year and particularly enjoyed. I think I can guarantee nobody will feel like a cultural deadbeat after reading my list.

Top Mystery Reads

Louise Penny: A Trick of the Light (Maybe not quite as good as Bury Your Dead, but still terrific. Of course, the Armand Gamache series is my weakness.)

Kate Atkinson: Started Early, Took My Dog (This entry in the Jackson Brodie series picks up shortly after the Masterpiece Mystery! dramatization left off. Atkinson is one of the best writers out there.)

Cyril Hare: An English Murder (A classic British country house murder mystery, but with incisive commentary on British attitudes about class, ethnicity and religion.)

Fred Vargas: An Uncertain Place (Yet another quirky title in the Inspector Adamsberg series.)

Jill Paton-Walsh: The Attenbury Emeralds (A continuation of Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey series.)

Peter Lovesey: Stagestruck (This book about murder in a theater in Bath is part of the Peter Diamond series.)

G. M. Malliet: Wicked Autumn (This is the first in a new series featuring a former MI-5 agent who is now an English country vicar.)

Robert Barnard: A Stranger in the Family (There's nobody like Barnard. This is his 28th standalone mystery and he's already published another one this year. Not to mention his three series and his four books written as Bernard Bastable.)

Alan Bradley: I Am Half Sick of Shadows (Flavia de Luce at Christmastime.)

Top Non-Mystery Fiction Reads

Anthony Powell: A Dance to the Music of Time (Four big volumes telling the story of British society and the empire from the 1930s to the 1970s.  I was mesmerized by it and didn't know what to do with myself for weeks after I finished it.)

Muriel Spark: A Far Cry From Kensington (One of the most mordantly witty books ever.)

Adam Johnson: The Orphan Master's Son (An tour-de-force about contemporary life in North Korea.)

Jane Gardam: Old Filth (Funny, sad, touching tale of the life of Sir Edward Feathers. Like A Dance to the Music of Time, it's as much about the British Empire as it is about the characters' lives.)

Stephen King: 11/22/63 (On one level, a time-travel book about trying to prevent the JFK assassination. On a deeper level, about connectedness.)

Chad Harbach: The Art of Fielding (A coming-of-age story about baseball and much more.)

Fannie Flagg: I Still Dream About You (Fannie Flagg is one of my guilty pleasures and this book was just as satisfying as the rest.)

D. E. Stevenson: Miss Buncle's Book (A real find.  Set in England in the 1950s and about a spinster who decides to write a book to make some much-needed money. She can only write what she knows, so she writes a thinly-disguised book about the people in the village. Complications ensue. This title has been issued by Persephone Books, which reprints neglected classics of 20th-century authors, usually women.)

Top Nonfiction Reads

Erik Larson: In the Garden of Beasts (Novelistic story of a college professor made ambassador to Germany in the 1930s Nazi era, and his adult daughter who accompanied him to Berlin, along with his wife and adult son.)

Siddhartha Mukherjee: The Emperor of All Maladies (A compellingly readable biography of cancer.)

Laura Hillenbrand: Unbroken (Astonishing story of Louis Zamperini, who went from juvenile delinquent to Olympic runner, to POW of the Japanese in World War II.)

Richard J. Evans: The Coming of the Third Reich (You'd think there isn't any more that can be said on the subject, but Evans proves that wrong.)

Nella Last's War (Just before the outbreak of World War II, Britain established the Mass Observation Project, in which ordinary people were asked to write diaries and answer questionnaires about their views on contemporary events.  Nella Last, an ordinary housewife in a seacoast town, wrote a diary that is full of everyday detail, but also reveals her deepest feelings about married life, her children, the war, her country, her neighbors, the role of women and more.)

Now it's your turn . . .

Cozy with an Edge

I had fully expected to enjoy G. M. Malliet's first mystery, Death of a Cozy Writer, when it was released a few years ago. It had been introduced to high critical acclaim, won an Agatha for best first novel, and was shortlisted for several other prestigious awards. It had everything for a cozy lover: English manor house, guests trapped by a snowstorm, nasty rich author taunting his greedy children about changes to his will, grand denoument with all of the suspects assembled. Fond memories of Christie's And Then There Were None and The Mousetrap swirling in my head, I promptly read it–and regretted it.

It is a police procedural, but the detectives aren't introduced until the last third of the book, and then quite sketchily. If it is fair play, as the classics usually are, I couldn't spot the clues. Most of the characters are tiresome caricatures of the usual suspects from other cozies, and the style is so archly tongue-in-cheek that I had trouble finishing it. She has written a couple more in that series, neither of which I've bothered to read.

So why, when offered a review copy of Wicked Autumn: A Max Tudor Novel, the author's first book in a new series, did I take it? Maybe it was the comparison one reviewer made to St. Mary Mead, Miss Marple's home town. Or the protagonist, a sexy MI-5 spy turned village vicar (now that's a little different in a cozy). Maybe a good editor had reined in the overblown self-conscious humor? For whatever reason, I'm very glad I did!

As the first in an intended series, quite a bit of the book is devoted to a leisurely set-up so thorough that a careful reader could find her way if dropped suddenly into the center of the village, and could probably recognize many of the characters on the street. No map is included, although the author has posted a charming online interactive map of Nether Monkslip to complete its cozy credentials. The cast of characters is also listed, so we can probably expect to meet most of them in subsequent books–unless they're killed off first.

Although the lanes are still narrow and some of the buildings may lean a little, Nether Monkslip (what in the world does that mean?) has had a bit of an update since the days of the traditional cozy. Many of the businesses in town do a brisk internet trade in items from antiques to new-age crystals to handmade marzipan candies. Father Max thought he had found an idyllic place to scrub away the memories of his MI-5 service that still haunted him.

Of course every pudding has its lumps, and Nether Monkslip's is wealthy Wanda Batton-Smythe, formidable self-appointed Leader of the Community and head of the Women's Institute. As the book opens, she is busily planning the Harvest Fayre; perfectly sure of how it should be run, running roughshod over any and all other opinions. Are we unbearably surprised when she shows up dead in the midst of the Fayre? The cause of death, which at first seems obvious, turns out to involve a fairly terrible method completely new to me.

This is an enjoyable fair-play spoof on the mysteries of the Golden Age. Occasional flashes of well-placed laugh-out-loud humor have replaced the brittle archness that set my teeth on edge in the earlier book. I was a little concerned with how much of Max's past the author reveals in this first book; will he continue to be as intriguing a figure with his angst out of the bag–at least to the reader? Of course, the burning question of whether Father Max is unmarried from religious conviction or happenstance will probably continue to occupy the villagers for books to come.

I laud the author’s attempts to carry the classic cozy into the 21st century and "beef it up" a bit, and will follow her efforts with interest. For my taste, the sub-genre has become a little overpopulated in recent years with coffee, quiche, and quilts; so a young handsome vicar makes a welcome entry into the field.

Note: I received Wicked Autumn: A Max Tudor Novel as a free review copy. Also, portions of the review in this post appear in a book review posted on the book's product pages on Amazon, under my Amazon pen name.