"I've been a fool about this. Locked rooms, as you said, on the brain."- Detective-Inspector Humbleby (Edmund Crispin's "The Name on the Window," collected in Beware of the Trains, 1953)
Georgette
Heyer was a British novelist well-versed in several genres, consisting
mainly of Regency romances, historical fiction and mystery novels, which were
largely republished over the past fifteen years – including the books
chronicling the cases of Superintendent Hannasyde and Inspector Hemingway.
Reportedly, Heyer garnered most of her
literary fame in the field of historical romance novels. She wrote many novels
that were set in the Regency period or the Georgian era, which made Heyer "legendary
for her research" and "historical accuracy," but her mystery novels
seem to have failed to scale the reputational heights of her historical
fiction.
However, I've read some interesting, if
varying, opinions from my fellow and highly respected connoisseurs in murder
about her work.
The opinions seem to be divided where
some of her most recognizable mystery novels are concerned, such as Why
Shoot a Butler? (1933), Death in the Stocks (1935) and The Blunt
Instrument (1938), but are overall consistent and positive about Envious
Casca (1941), which is a conventional country-house mystery in the spirit
of Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938) by Agatha
Christie – and even has a locked
room mystery at the heart of its plot. So, guess which Heyer mystery this
predictable hack picked?
Envious Casca takes place at the manor house of a wealthy curmudgeon, Nathaniel
Herriard, where his much more cheerful brother, Joseph, has taken charge of
preparing a Christmas party and invited a small band of people. Unfortunately,
it's a collection of highly incompatible personalities, which leads to
irritation and murder!
There are, first of all, the Herriard
brothers: Nathaniel is a rich, semi-retired businessman who became somewhat of
an old humbug, who believed Christmas to be "a series of quarrels between
inimical persons bound to one another only be the accident of relationship"
and "thrown together by a worn-out convention which degreed that at
Christmas families should forgather" – which is simply begging to have
several spirits haunting up your bedroom a day before Christmas. Joseph is a
much more pleasantly person, overly nice even, who spend most of years as a
traveling actor and has since two years returned, but is financially completely
depended upon his brother. Joseph brought along his wife, named Maud, who spend
most of the story irritating the people around her by sharing tidbits of
information from the biography she's reading about an Austrian-Hungarian
empress.
A dead brother of Nathaniel and Joseph
left two children behind: a "rough-tongued young man with no manners,"
named Stephan, who's the prospected heir of Nathaniel's fortune and a sister,
Paula, who equals her brother in all his unpleasant characteristics.
Stephen has brought along Valerie Dean:
his pretty, but childishly naïve, finance whose personal motives makes her a
common gold-digger in the eyes of Nathaniel. Paula is a stage-actress and is
accompanied by Willoughby Roydon, a postmodern playwright of "grimly
realistic plays," which is why Nathaniel refuses to cough up several
thousands of pounds to finance his play – much to the chagrin of Paula who
wanted the main part in the play. The party is rounded out by Mathilda Clare, a
cousin, and Nathaniel business partner, Edgar Mottisfont.
In such company, you can almost
understand why an old grouch like Nathaniel refuses to answer the knocks on his
bedroom door. As Inspector Hemingway remarked, he would in his place have
locked himself in his room and "very likely shove a heavy piece of furniture" against the door, but there was a far more serious reason why no answer
emanated from behind the locked bedroom door. A murderer had poked Nathaniel in
the back with a knife and "then dematerialized himself like the spooks you
read about."
The locked room aspect of the murder has
Inspector Hemingway and Sergeant Ware pleasantly baffled, which leads to minor,
but interesting, discussion how the murder could've escaped from the room –
which includes "the old pencil-and-string trick" and the possibility
that "the key was turned with a pair of eyebrow-pluckers."
Something of historical interest about
the tool consisting of "a pair of forceps shaped a bit like eyebrow-pluckers
to open locked doors," because it’s a burglary-tool called an "oustiti."
I was unable to find a picture of those forceps, but I came across a reference describing it as "an
essential item of a burglar’s tool kit" and it even quoted this book! The tool
was also mentioned in Modern Police Work (1939), which you can find and read
here.
Anyhow, the eventual explanation for the
locked room is as simple as it's risky and the only weakness is the luck of the
murderer that everything panned out the way it did, but loved how the solution
took its cue from history – instead of being pulled from the burglar's tool
kit. I also appreciated how the murderer and Hemingway basically stumbled to
the idea for the locked room trick by discovering the same thing, which was the
only part of the puzzle that had baffled Hemingway up to the near end. However,
it's not a classic of the impossible crime genre. But it was nice enough.
Hemingway saw through the murderer's ruse
and hardly believed anything that was thrown at his way, which included a cigarette
case, a missing book, a bloodstained handkerchief, some rude behavior and even
a link to the Sino-Japanese War. The good inspector knew how to separate the
clues from the red herrings and did not belong to the "lot of half-baked people"
that murderer banked on believing an apparent innocent person to be actually
innocent. Only problem is that most of readers probably belong to the same
category as Hemingway. I read a very apt comment how Heyer here obviously tried
to out-Christie Christie in the least-likely-suspect department, which made the
murderer stand-out more and more with each passing chapter – making the
revelation of this person’s identity a couple of chapters before the ending a
good move.
Regardless of these minor trivialities, I
genuinely enjoyed Envious Casca as a whole. It's an extremely
conventional mystery novel with a conservative plot-and cast of characters, which
can hardly be labeled original, but the story moves around gracefully within
the confines of the conventional manor house mystery. Like a swan elegantly
paddling around in a fountain.
