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.

Find that village!

Earlier this week, I was reading a feature about the 16 most picturesque villages in the world. Several interested me, including Bilbury, in England's Cotswolds and Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario. I'd like to visit those places, but the feature got me to thinking of some of the villages I've enjoyed spending time in while I read some of my favorite village mysteries.

St. Mary Mead

St. Mary Mead is home to Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple, though only three of the books (The Murder At the Vicarage, The Body In the Library and The Mirror Crack'd) take place there––and, to be fair, some stories. Still, when you think of Miss Marple, you can't help but think of St. Mary Mead.

I decided to see what Agatha Christie had in mind when she dreamed up St. Mary Mead. It turns out that's a bit of a controversial topic. Some devoted fans were outraged when the Granada television's 2004 production of The Murder At the Vicarage showed stationery indicating St. Mary Mead had an Oxfordshire location, which they howled was way too far from the sea. Despite the location on the stationery, this episode was filmed in the village of Hambleden, on the Thames in Buckinghamshire, which has often been used for filming village locations, notably in the Midsomer Murders series based on the Caroline Graham books.

Hambleden Mill

Hampshire, many insist, must be where St. Mary Mead "really" is. There are a lot of location clues in the books. It's supposed to be only 25 miles from London on a rail line that arrives at Paddington Station, on the west side of London, and it's 12 miles from the sea. Fans of Miss Marple suggest that Market Basing, the nearby market town described in the books, could be real-life Basingstoke, and Danemouth, a seaside resort town, could be real-life Bournemouth. There is a village in Hampshire called St. Mary Bourne, but nobody seems to think Christie had it in mind.

Outdoor scenes in the Miss Marple series starring Joan Hickson (my favorite Jane Marple) were filmed in the delightfully-named Nether Wallop, in Hampshire. This name doesn't refer to a whack on the rear end, despite the way it sounds. "Wallop" is apparently derived from old English words meaning valley and stream. "Nether" means further down. I'd definitely like to visit Nether Wallop, no matter how silly the name sounds or what it might mean.

Nether Wallop, Hampshire

Nether Monkslip

Speaking of Nethers, the new Max Tudor series by G. M. Malliett is set in Nether Monkslip, another fictional English village. Periphera talked about the book back in October, including the fact that the author's website includes a nifty interactive map of the village. Check it out: Interactive Map of Nether Monkslip. Having a map of the village in a village mystery is such a pleasure!

Bishop's Lacey

When precocious 11-year-old sleuth Flavia de Luce has pushed things a little too far at home at her family's country house, Buckshaw, she hops on her bicycle, Gladys, and heads into the village of Bishop's Lacey to see what kind of trouble she can get into there. Since it's the early 1950s, with rationing still in effect, there are real limits to the appeal of this particular village. Still, the countryside is lovely and there is always something entertaining going on in town, like a touring magic show that everyone turns out to watch. It's an electrifying experience, as you'll learn if you read The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag. The whole village also turns up at Buckshaw for a Christmas show put on by a visiting film crew in I Am Half-Sick of Shadows.

St. Denis, France

These English villages are all well and good, but sometimes you might be in the mood for more sun, more wine and good French food. That's when you should head for Martin Walker's St. Denis in the Dordogne, home of Bruno Courrèges, Chief of Police. It seems like the sun shines constantly, and you can relax at a café table with a glass of Ricard and water, watching the old-timers playing petanque.

St. Denis is a small village of fewer than 3,000 residents, but its main street has its wine shop, boulangerie, fromagerie, charcuterie and just about any -erie you could want to live the good life. The weekly open-air market is where you'll stroll around, picking up delicacies and the freshest foods to make your meal a celebration. Bruno is great at warning the stall-keepers when the EU food inspectors are on the prowl, so you'll be able to get the real home-grown thing without interference by the persnickety hygiene squad.

Three Pines, Québec

The village I'm most curious about is Louise Penny's creation in the Eastern Townships region of Québec province, near the Vermont border. When homicide detective Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Québec Sûreté goes there to investigate a murder, he notes that Three Pines doesn't appear on any maps. Most of its residents are Montrealers who found it by accident when they were looking for a place to start a new life––which they expected to find much further away.

And how fortunate Three Pines has been in some of those who found their way there. Myrna, a former psychologist, opens a bookstore. Olivier and Gabri open a B&B and a nearby bistro. Their businesses take their places around the village green with M. Béliveau's depannier (general store) and Sarah's boulangerie. Monks in the nearby countryside provide the rich, runny cheeses and the local farms the fresh produce and meat.

Villagers stroll across the green on a whim for a delicious meal or a drink at the bistro. In the winter, two fireplaces warm the room, and in the summer there's a sunny terrace with cheerful umbrellas where you can enjoy a fresh lemonade, a cold beer or a gin and tonic. So many of Sarah's freshly-baked croissants are eaten in this series that I sometimes want to bang my head in hungry frustration.

Villagers are shopkeepers, innkeepers, painters, poets, woodsmen and cabinetmakers. People with boring jobs seem to do them out of town. Or maybe they don't even live there. Well, wait. There is Billy Williams, who seems to be a jack-of-all-trades. I guess you have to have one of those.

Three Pines is so appealing that I've spent an inordinate amount of time poring over maps trying to figure out what village might be its model. Then I started reading Louise Penny's blog. She lives in a town called Sutton–––in the Eastern Townships. I could drive there in less than five hours. Get a grip, I tell myself. You're one road trip away from being a stalker.

Maybe I could cut the stalking trip short and just stop on the way in a Vermont village, Norwich, to visit another mecca of mine, King Arthur Flour.

At least there I could learn to make my own damn croissants!

* * *

Aside from their unnervingly high murder rate, don't these places sound like they should make a feature's list of most appealing fictional villages? Do you have your own favorite villages from mystery reading? Which fictional villages do you wish you could live in––or at least visit?

By the way, not that it really has anything to do with my theme today (other than general TGIF-ness), but I came across this "map" of funny (mostly sexual and scatalogical) place names in Britain and thought you might enjoy it. I wonder if there's a lot of pressure in Giggleswick to be cheerful all the time.

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.