Murder at Beechlands (1948) by Maureen Sarsfield

Maureen K. Heard was a British author who had a brief, fleeting career as a fiction writer during the 1940s, producing sevens novel from 1943 to 1948, comprises of four children's books, two detective novels and a mainstream book – published either under her married name or penname, "Maureen Sarsfield." Those two, once long-forgotten, detective novels have been hailed in more recent times as "gems of the British school."

In 2003, the still sorely missed Rue Morgue Press reprinted Sarsfield's Green December Fills the Graveyard (1945) and A Party for Lawty (1948), but gave their editions new, more genre-driven, titles, Murder at Shots Hall and Murder at Beechlands.

Tom and Enid Schantz explained their decision that the original, nondescript titles "may have been partly to blame" for, what they assumed, "were unimpressive sales." I kind of liked the original titles. Sure, they're perhaps "a bit too literary," but fitted the smartly written, character-driven detective novels that can be ranked alongside the works of Dorothy Bowers, Moray Dalton, Joan Cowdroy and Elizabeth Gill. The new titles are too simple and generic.

Sarsfield's lead-character is a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Lane Parry, who "twice finds evil deeds in the backwaters of Sussex" and remember enjoying Murder at Shots Hall with a slew of poisonings surrounding a bombed, partially destroyed manor house, but Parry got upstaged by one of the characters, Flikka – a young sculptor who lives and works at the manor house. So I always wanted to read the second novel and, looking for a non-locked room mystery, I decided to finally take Murder at Beechlands from the big pile.

Murder at Beechlands finds Inspector Lane Parry stranded in a drift by the side of the road, "feet deep in snow," with his car refusing to move another inch. A raging snowstorm has turned the Sussex landscape into a white, practically impassable, hellscape.

Parry decides to follow "an enormously high, forbidding stone wall" on foot in the hope of finding a lodge or gate, but half expects to find a derelict mansion, prison or a mental institution behind the fortified wall obviously intended "either to keep people out or to keep them in." What he found convinced Parry he had stumbled his way to a private lunatic asylum, where the inmates were loudly screeching ("Lawty! Lawty! Lawty!") and fighting in the snow, but the woman, Mrs. Anabel Adams, who he had pecked as the matron turned out to be the owner of Beechlands Hotel. A small, financially troubled country hotel with a less than spotless reputation in the region. And they were hosting a party in honor of a well-known, womanizing World War II Wing Commander, Lawton "Lawty" Lawrence.

A party not everyone turned up to on account of the snowstorm and the hotel is practically empty when Parry arrived.

The people who did make it to the hotel are Jim Bridges, severely burned during the war, who had lost his wife to Lawty when he lay "all mashed up in hospital" and Christie Layne had lost her virtue to the bomber pilot, but they were there strictly on the invitation of Mrs. Adams. Cintra Norton is "the greatest film star we ever sent to Hollywood" and used to be friends with Lawty before he went abroad. Marigold Trent is a natural platinum blonde, who was sent down by some very old friends of Mrs. Adams, but she hadn't paid her bills since she arrived. Lastly, the party is rounded out by the hotel receptionist, Miss Killigrew, and two London businessmen, Julian Frake and Paul Livington, who might be willing to invest money in Beechlands – one of the reasons why they were invited by Mrs. Adams. She wanted to "suitably impress" them. 

And now, this unlikely party is trapped together in the partially empty hotel for the night. Something that would not have been a problem had it not been for Lawty's battered body underneath the window of his room. Parry quickly deduces Lawty's death wasn't an accident or suicide, but cold blooded murder!

Normally, a raging snowstorm is used as nothing more than a device to confine the characters to a single location, but Sarsfield used it to wage a war of nerves on her characters as the lights begin to slowly die and incidents keep happening. A second body is discovered in the boiler room, but Parry keeps this second death a secret "to keep everyone on such tenterhooks" that, whoever committed the murders, "get in such a state of nerves he'll give himself away." Parry is assisted in mounting the tension by several attacks, professionally disabled phone lines and the unlucky past of the hotel with its unnerving, ghostly taps said to be heard before someone dies, but even Parry is not immune to his gloomy, nerve-stricken surroundings and wonders how long he would "be able to go on keeping his temper."

So, when it comes to handling atmosphere and tension, Sarsfield's Murder at Beechlands is what Ngaio Marsh tried to do with the abysmal Death and the Dancing Footman (1942).

Where the plot is concerned, the journey to the ending was better than the solution, which was not bad or atrociously clued, but found it underwhelming with only the motive standing out, because usually, this type of motive is only mentioned in (Golden Age) detective stories – not often used as an actual motive for the murderer. One of many (small) signs in this book that times were slowly starting to change for the traditional detective story. Nevertheless, Murder at Beechlands is a busily plotted, eventful detective story that keeps you reading and has a few memorable setpieces.

I mentioned that one of my reasons for picking Murder at Beechlands is that it's supposed to be a non-impossible crime novel, but technically, I should label this post as a locked room mystery. And there two of them!

Firstly, there's knocking and yelling from behind the locked door of the room where the bodies are kept, but they never get an opportunity to consider it a locked room mystery because the situation immediately resolves itself with a very simplistic explanation. But still, it made for a great scene. Secondly, one of the characters vanishes from the snowbound hotel and is not found when the place is searched, which gives it the appearance of locked room mystery, until you learn the solution. So these minor, quasi-impossibilities doesn't make Murder at Beechlands a long-overlooked locked room novel, but appreciated Sarsfield flirted so heavily with my favorite detective story trope. It also gave me this dreadful feeling that she actually wrote and completed a third, full-blown impossible crime novel, but the unpublished manuscript got lost and any trace of it was lost to time. Because that's how it usually goes.

So, all in all, Murder at Beechlands is a mostly well-written, excellently characterized and atmospheric treatment of the snowbound murder mystery, only marred by an underwhelming solution, but, like RMP, you have to wonder where Sarsfield's career would have brought her had "she continued in the vein of these two books."