"It's a dangerous piece of knowledge to possess, and it's well known that one murder leads to another."- Mr. Winkley (Harriet Rutland's Bleeding Hooks, 1940)
Morna
Doris MacTaggert was the birth-name of "Elizabeth
Ferrars," or "E.X. Ferrars," whose career as a mystery novelist spanned
five decades, from 1940 to the mid-1990s, during which she wrote over seventy
crime novels and numerous short stories – some of them were posthumously
collected (e.g. The
Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries, 2012).
Ferrars has been called the closet of all
mystery novelists to Agatha
Christie in "style, plotting and general milieu," but I suspect this
to be an arbitrary, superficial comparison similar to how the late P.D. James was once
heralded as her "Crown Princess." They were female mystery writers who were, at
one point in time, contemporaries of one another, which is where the
similarities come to a halt. I've read only two of Ferrars' detective stories,
but I think the subject of this blog-post showed a writer who fundamentally
differed from Christie. As well as poking the popular notion that detective
stories from the Golden Era only dwelled in the stuffy, hearth-warmed drawing
rooms of ancestral mansions in the eye.
I, Said the Fly (1945) was published in the final year of World War II, but opens
in 1941 in a bombed-out street in London and proceeds to tell the story of what
happened there in the year preceding the war.
Before the bombs, Little Carberry Street
had already lost a lot of its eighteenth century respectability and became
dominated by the squalor of the poor. The windows were hung with "curtains
of soiled yellow lace," bug-infested rooms and the street "filled by the
shrill voices of swarms of illdressed, underfed children" and the
disturbing "singing of homegoing drunks" – interspersed with "screams
and shouts" and "fighting in the street." Kay Bryant found herself
occupying a cheap bed-sitting-room on the top floor of No. 10 Little Carberry Street
after she drifted away from her husband and had an "extreme shortage of
money."
She returned to the place "to see what
the blitz had done to it" and began to remember the grim, horrifying events
that took place there. It began when Kay's neighbor, Pamela Fuller, convinced
their landlady, Miss Lingard, to install a gas-fire in her room, but the
gas-fitters found something beneath the floorboards that delayed the job: a
revolver swaddled in a dust cloth!
The firearm is linked by the police to a
murder that occurred a fortnight before the floorboards were lifted: a naked,
mutilated body of a woman, shot through the heart, was discovered on Hampstead
Heath and the victim is identified as a former tenant – which makes it very
likely that the murderer is an occupant of No. 10. There are more than enough
potential suspects for Inspector Corey to review.
Tovey is the caretaker of the place who
shuffles around the place to make "symbolic gestures of cleaning" and
can usually be "found outside a door or round a bend in the staircase,"
which does not make him a very popular figure. He often verbally abuses Miss
Lingard, but excuses him as being "quite a character" and "had
trouble with his poor old head" after being wounded in World War I. Ted Hay
and Melissa Ivory share a room and live a "dark life of sin." Hay makes
his loving "in a hand-to-mouth fashion on the edge of the world of
journalism" and "knew who was going to marry whose wife" or "who
was homosexual." Ivory was simply "a very odd person" and attempting
to figure her out got nobody anywhere. Charlie Boyce is a tenant on the
first-floor and loves to wake everyone up whenever he has forgotten his
latch-key and Kay would not be surprised that his whole existence was made up
of "one unmentionable crime after another." Mrs. Flower lives on the
ground floor and "loans her front room to a lot of her girlfriends and their
gentlemen acquaintances," which presumably comes with "a commission on
the transaction" that helps her pay the rent.
Well, I said Ferrars did not struck me as
an Agatha Christie-type mystery writer and the backdrop, characters and even
the plot of I, Said the Fly can testify to that. However, Ferrars was
still a product of the Golden Age and that becomes very evident towards the end
of the book when some of the characters begin to draw-up dummy cases against
each other, which was (plot-wise) my favorite part of the book – because I
liked them better than the eventual explanation. Not that the solution was
thoroughly bad, or anything, but I simply enjoyed how the characters were
airing their suspicions and attempted to make the evidence fit their
pet-theories. I was pleasantly reminded of Anthony
Berkeley! But it also made the real explanation somewhat underwhelming.
