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

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!

Gleanings from the Golden Age

The Golden Age of mystery fiction is often defined as the period between the two great World Wars, although it actually lasted a little longer; from the late Edwardian period through the early Cold War Era. During this period, readers and writers in both Britain and the US went murder-mystery mad. Readers could not get enough of the authors' gentleman detectives and society ladies, as they turned their attention to the solutions of clever crimes that stymied the usually rather dull police. Classes were still well-defined; only gradually did the leveling effects of the first World War and the subsequent Great Depression erode the privileged status of the fortunate few. Today, these classic stories offer readers a glimpse into an age that looked golden indeed––at least for the wealthy few!

Most readers are familiar with Agatha Christie's Hercules Poirot and Miss Marple, the fastidious upper-class detectives of Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh, and John Dickson Carr's eccentric and curmudgeonly Dr. Gideon Fell. Many have chuckled over G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, whose mysteries have been televised and are currently running on PBS. Josephine Tey wrote only a few mysteries, but her The Daughter of Time, The Singing Sands, and Brat Farrar are all unusual stories, among my favorite books. On this side of the pond, Erle Stanley Gardner churned out stories of Perry Mason and Bertha Cool, while Mary Roberts Rinehart kept readers enthralled with her romantic mysteries, and Ellery Queen and his father solved their tricky logic puzzles.

In addition to numerous novels and stories featuring her famous detectives, Agatha Christie also wrote a number of short stories about Parker Pyne, whose specialty was introducing a bit of mystery and romance into the lives of bored suburbanites. Most of these have been collected in Parker Pyne Investigates. Not murder mysteries, but if you have never read them, they are a charming treat. Almost uniquely among writers of this period, Christie was not a social snob; housemaids and struggling suburbanites were treated respectfully and sympathetically at her hands.

Have you ever heard of Clara Benson? I hadn't. Clara, born in 1890, wrote several mysteries featuring a society matron, Angela Marchmont, as protagonist. Clara wrote as a hobby, and passed her stories around among her friends. While they were good enough that friends urged her to publish them, she always declined, and it wasn't until 1965 that family members rediscovered her work and offered it to the public.

In The Mystery at Underwood House, Angela is begged by her friend Louisa Haynes to attend a semi-annual dinner with the extended Haynes family. The four children of the late Philip Haynes detested each other, but a stipulation in his will required the periodic meetings, which usually included their spouses and children. At each of the last three dinners, one of the siblings had died, apparently of an accident. Only Louisa's husband John is left, and Louisa is terrified for him. On each death, a large sum of money from the estate (the heirs had a life interest only) goes to the lawyer and executor, who is never present at the dinners. The story revolves around an obscure device in British law called a Secret Trust. Take a look at the Wikipedia description––it seems to offer the mystery author a number of delightful opportunities for crime and confusion. I'm surprised we haven't seen it used more often in Golden Age fiction.

Murders in these mysteries are always personal; the fictional psychopathic serial killer and drug-crazed random shooter or rapist are the products of a later and more cynical age. While the methods employed are clever and varied, readers of classic mysteries are not subjected to lengthy descriptions of skinned and rotting corpses, and forensics play a much smaller part than in today's crime stories. Most are fair play, which means that the reader is given all of the clues and can solve the mystery along with the detective. The supernatural, while sometimes invoked, is always a red herring, never part of the solution. Possibly the most satisfying thing about mysteries written during this period is that justice is always rendered in the end, usually––but not always––at the hands of the law.

Alan Hunter's series of police procedurals always makes me smile. DCI George Gently manages to appear both fuzzy and low-key, but his deductions are always strictly logical and based on his keen and unbiased powers of observation. His technique and success often manage to enrage local inspectors assigned to the case. Fortified with an unending supply of peppermint creams and accompanied by the rather dull Sergeant Dutt, Gently is sent for whenever a murder is too complex or politically hot for local police to solve. The author felt required to warn readers from the beginning that these are not typical whodunits, but tales of the painstaking building of evidence until a charge could be made. Many of the crimes he investigates take place on the beaches of East Anglia. Gently muses, 

"There seems to be some as-yet-undiscovered connection between coastal resorts and homicide, Dutt, have you noticed?... You mark my words, the sea has a bad influence on potential homicides, whether it's recognized or not."

A long-running British TV series was made of the Gently stories in the 1960s, starring Martin Shaw. I don't remember ever seeing it on PBS, but it is available on DVD for those interested.

Patricia Wentworth's Miss Maud Silver mysteries are very similar in mood and theme to Christie's Miss Jane Marple stories. Miss Silver, a governess turned private detective, is usually required to rescue a pair of innocent lovers, at least one of whom has been suspected of the crime. In The Chinese Shawl, Laura Fane has inherited little but a lovely country house from her parents. There is so little money that the house has been rented for many years to her remote cousin Angela, who had been engaged to her father at one time. When Angela's heir, beautiful Tanis, invites Laura for a visit, it will be the first time she has ever seen the house her father so loved. During the weekend the flirtatious Tanis is found murdered, a piece of the Chinese shawl Laura inherited from her mother clutched in her hand. Only Miss Silver, who seems to have educated many of the British upper classes in her governess days, can put the pieces together.

Until I began rummaging nostalgically around in this period, I had thought my supply of these gentle, civilized crime stories was exhausted. How wrong I was!  It will be a pleasure to search out, read, and share some of the dozens of lesser-known lights from this incredibly productive age.