"Surely a collection of old books is harmless enough?"- Bobby Owen (E.R. Punshon's Comes a Stranger, 1938)
Jill
Paton Walsh is a British novelist, who began her career as an author
of children's fiction, but during the early 1990s she turned her eye
to detective stories and her first, tentative steps in the genre were
shortlisted for the CWA Gold
Dagger Award – which was an auspicious beginning. However,
Paton garnered most of her fame, as a mystery novelist, when she was
tapped by the estate of Dorothy
L. Sayers to complete her unfinished Lord Peter Wimsey novel,
Thrones, Dominations (1998). She has since then penned three
additional books based on the characters created by the Queen of the
Literary Detective Novel.
As
a purist snob, I tend to curl my upper lip in absolute disgust at the
mere idea of pastiches. I share Rex
Stout's sentiment when he said that writers should "roll
their own," but there are a few, rare exceptions that even I
found impossible to condemn, because they actually respected and did
justice to the original – one of these exceptions to the rule was
Walsh's Thrones, Dominations.
Walsh's
commentary
on the completion of the unfinished manuscript showed the kind of
respect you should expect from a writer handling someone else's
creations. She mentioned that "the fragmented notes made it
clear who the murderer was," but felt tempted to "invert
her scheme" and make "the victim top the murderer."
But it was Sayers' book and therefore Walsh followed her pattern,
which is what made Thrones, Dominations and A Presumption
of Death (2002) such pleasant reads.
So
the remaining titles in this continuation of the Lord Peter Wimsey
series, The Attenbury Emeralds (2010) and The Late Scholar
(2013), were jotted down on my never-ending wishlist years ago, but
also wanted to sample some of Walsh's own crime-fiction. I actually
collected all but one of them over the years and dumped them on the
big pile. It was kind of time I finally took a look at one of them.
The
Wyndham Case (1993) is the first of four novels about Walsh's own
series-character, Imogen Quy, a college nurse attached to the
fictional St. Agatha's College, Cambridge. My reason for picking this
particular title is that I had seen it billed as a locked
room mystery, but that turned out not to be the case. However, it
was still a good detective novel in the tradition of such
(lesser-known) literary Crime Queens as Dorothy
Bowers, Joanna
Cannan and Elizabeth
Gill.
The
story begins with Walsh's heroine, Nurse Quy, being dragged by the
Master to the Wyndham Library where the body of Philip Skellow, a
history student with a scholarship, was found spread-eagled beneath
the famous "Wyndham Case" - a ginormous, "two-storey
bookcase of ancient oak" with "a little gallery running
along it."
Wyndham
Library was bequeathed to the college by a seventeenth century
occultist, Christopher Wyndham, who was a "passionate opponent
of Sir Isaac Newton," but the Wyndham Bequest came with a
series of conditions that proved to troublesome as the time went on.
A
permanent, overpaid library keeper was to be appointed and his only
task was to make sure no books were taken out, or added to the
collection, which consisted of books dealing with such obscure and
rejected ideas that they were only of interest for "their
splendid binding" or the insight they offered on "the
history of typography" - which means they were "reverently
inspected, but never read." Wyndham also designed the special
lock on the door and only two people were supposed to be in
possession of the keys: the library keeper and an (unknown) auditor.
One every century, on an unknown date, the college is visited by an
auditor to inspect the library. So a lot of trouble to simply become
the custodians of a burdensome collection of ancient, yellowing tomes
without any appear to scholars, but the college was in financial dire
straits in 1692 and could not afford to turn the bequest down.
All
of the conditions Wyndham placed on the college was the first domino
stone to fall in a long series of events that resulted in several
deaths, but I'll return to that aspect of the plot later on in the
review.
First
of all, there's the police investigation and Quy finds herself
working on the inside of the college to help her policeman friend,
Mike Parsons, with clearing up the numerous questions surrounding the
death of the young student. One of them is what Philip was doing in
the library, after dark, and how he obtained access to the vault-like
room, but there's also the inexplicable pool of wet blood around the
head of the stiffened body – as he was not a haemophiliac. Quy is
the kept the busiest with sorting out the mess of Philip's college
life. Philip was "a grammar-school boy," with poor
parents, who was not very popular with his more well-to-do peers,
such as his roommate, but lately, he had ready cash to spend. Who did
he get the money? Why did his roommate, Jack Taversham, suddenly
disappear? And how is all of this related to the drowning of a medic
student in the fountain pool?
What
impressed me the most about all of the plot-threads is not only how
tightly they're interwoven with one another, but how they're depended
upon one another to have played out in the way they did. It's like
one, long row of falling domino stones that began in the late 1600s
and if one thing had gone differently nobody would have died.
If
the Wyndham Bequest had not such idiotic, strenuous conditions the
subsequent tragedies would simply not have happened. If the Domestic
Bursar of St. Agatha's College had assigned Philip and Jack to
different rooms, the former probably would not have died on the cold
floor of the library. If Philip had not planned an Easter holiday in
Kashmir or forgot his appointment with Quy to get holiday
inoculations he would certainly not have died (etc, etc, etc).
It's
one of the best examples of the Merrivalean "blinkin'
awful cussedness of things in general" at work, which is
a lovely way to structure a plot, but it should be pointed out that
the actual clues are rather thinly spread around – which might be a
problem for an armchair detective. There is, however, an important
clue hidden early on in the story that should tell you what Philip
was doing in the library and how he got pass the locked door, but, as
you probably guessed from this blog-post, that's only a minor part of
the overall plot. So you have to keep that in mind when you pick up
The Wyndham Case.
All
in all, The Wyndham Case is a well-written mystery novel, like
a modern Crime Queen, with a tricky plot structure that's as unusual
as it satisfying, but not one that really lends itself to the reader
who wants to play armchair detective. Once again, you have to keep
that in mind. However, in spite of this minor reserve, The Wyndham
Case is light-years ahead, in overall quality, of pretty much 99%
of what has been published since the 1960s under the banner of
crime-and detective fiction. I can specifically recommend the book to
readers who love the Golden Age Crime Queens and their followers.
Finally,
the next blog-post will probably be a review of a locked room novel,
but I'm torn between two options. One of them is a writer from the
seventies and eighties who penned three locked room mysteries and the
other one is an obscure Dutch novel from the early 2000s with a very
unusual impossible situation. Ah, luxury problems!
