A Veiled Threat

"Sure, it's dangerous. It's been dangerous, it is dangerous, and it's going to be a whole lot more dangerous."

- from Ianthe Jerrold's There May Be Danger (1948)

Patricia Wentworth is primarily remembered as the author of thirty-three novels about Miss Maud Silver, a governess who became a consulting detective, which made her "one of the mystery genre's most prominent spinster sleuths," but her casebook only covers half of Wentworth's contribution to crime-fiction – which further consists of several short-lived series and a large pile of standalone novels. It's a part of her output that has long been overlooked, but, recently, the gang from Dean Street Press has dragged them from the bowels of obscurity. So let's take a look at one of them.

Weekend with Death (1941) appeared in the United Kingdom under a different title, namely Unlawful Occasions, but both editions of the book became rare, high-priced items on the secondhand book market. The price of a secondhand copy still hovers between sixty bucks and a full grand. Fortunately, you don't have to be a deep-pocketed collector of first-edition hardcover books to explore this new series of reprints.

Speaking of explorations, the plot of Weekend with Death roams across the neighboring borders of several sub-categories of the large, outstretched territory of the crime and mystery genre. There are components of suspense, thriller and espionage stories, but the plot also employs (faked) supernatural phenomena and this element is used to good effect – elevating the story above the usual fare for a spy-thriller. However, the story begins on a fairly traditional note.

The book opens in a small, cold waiting-room of a mist-enshrouded train station where the heroine of the story, Sarah Marlowe, finds herself in company of Miss Emily Case. A neat, shabby little woman who spend five years in Italy as a private nurse, but the shift from the pleasant, Mediterranean climate to the dreary weather of England is not the only shock Miss Case encountered upon her return home. She confides in Sarah how she found a wounded man, "looking just like death," in a railway carriage of a London train and the young man pressed a oiled-silk packet into her hands – urging her to not allow to "let them get it."

Well, that's enough to throw everyone off-balance, but Sarah is very skeptical and is not interested in getting "entangled with stray lunatics babbling of murdered men and mysterious packages." After all, she has to think of her position as the private-secretary to the President of the New Psychical Society, Wilson Cattermole, which largely consists of typing out letters about haunted houses, listening to his monologue and taking an interest in his wife, Joanna – who's convinced she has made contact with the ghost of a genuine eighteenth-century smuggler. So not exactly a line of work begging for an additional layer of mystification, but that's exactly what Sarah finds when she leaves Miss Case in the waiting-room to board her train.

Sarah discovers the mysterious, oiled-silk wrapped packet inside her handbag and the people who are after its content seem to be already on her tail. But that's not even the most distressing part. She reads in the newspaper about Miss Case's murder and the police is looking for the woman who talked with Miss Case in the waiting-room of the train station, which is accompanied by a good description of Sarah. A good and solid premise for detective-cum-thriller story, but at this point the story slowly begins to harkening back to the days of the sensational novels from the Victorian Era.

Mr. and Mrs. Cattermole gave Sarah a five seconds' notice to pack her bags and accompany them, in her capacity of secretary, to an old, gloomy and reputedly haunted house, which is called Maltings and the occupied part of the home dates back to only the seventeenth century. The wing that leads to the oldest part of the house is securely locked and apparently rife with supernatural occurrences. It's an excellent place to tell a ghost story or two and their host, Reverend Peter Brown, has plenty of them involving shape-shifting creatures, werewolves and vampires, but Sarah quickly learns a lesson we all learned from Scooby Doo – some of the most terrifying monsters are just mortal human beings underneath. But in this case that does not make the monsters any less dangerous or deadly.

This second half of the novel is an old-fashioned tale of suspense with the trappings of the thriller and spy story, but they are framed as a sensational tale from the Victorian period. You can find the influences from that period in the old, labyrinthine house and Sarah wandering through its dark passages at night. She even uncovers a secret passage! There are also some excellent, atmospheric set pieces in this portion of the book: a séance manifesting the ghost of Miss Case, a daring, ill-fated late-night attempt to escape from the place and the villains of the play coming up with a particular nasty and cruel way to rid themselves of Sarah.

So it leans heavily on some very old, time-worn tropes and a handful of incredible coincidences, such as how Sarah (unwittingly) brought the packet closer to its intended destination, but Wentworth knew how to write a yarn. I also believe the ghost-hunting angle lifted these tropes above themselves and helped make Weekend with Death a fun, captivating read. Only the ending and how the events were wrapped up was slightly underwhelming.

I'm not really good at reviewing crime stories that lack the proper structure of a traditional, fair-play and clue-filled mystery novel, but I liked this atmospheric suspense-cum-spy thriller and I think I begin to prefer Wentworth's standalone work to her Miss Silver novels.

I previously reviewed Silence in Court (1945) and The Benevent Treasure (1956).

The Golden Link

"You will consider your verdict."

-  Mr. Justice Springfellow (Raymond Postgate's Verdict of Twelve, 1940)

As you can probably deduce from my 2013 review of The Benevent Treasure (1956), I was not overly impressed with Patricia Wentworth and have ignored her work ever since, but Rupert Heath from Dean Street Press ever so kindly provided me with a review copy of one of her standalone novels – which sounded more appealing than any of her Miss Silver stories.

Silence in Court (1945) is the book in question and this brand new edition is prefaced by our very own genre-historian, Curt Evans, whose brief introduction is packed with potential material for a biography about Wentworth's family.

Wentworth was born to an Angelo-Indian military family during the heyday of the British Raj. Both her father and uncle had distinguished careers in the army, but perhaps the most interesting snippets of her family history concerned the lives of one of her stepsons and a younger brother during World War I and II.

One of her stepsons, George Dillon, was mining in Colorado when war was declared and he "worked his passage from Galveston, Texas to Bristol, England as a shipboard muleteer" and died at the Somme in 1916 – when he was only 29. Her younger brother, Hugh Elles, rose to the rank of brigadier-general in the Great War and "he was tasked with leading the defense of southwestern England" during the Second World War, which would have been an important role if the Battle of Britain had been fought on land instead of in the air.

So I thought that was a genuinely interesting part of Wentworth's family life, but how did the book itself measure up to my previous experience? Well, it was without a question better than The Benevent Treasure.

The protagonist of Silence in Court is a young woman, named Carey Silence, who suffered from shock when the train she was traveling in was machine-gunned from the air by the Nazis. She was told to take several months of rest, but her employer had been killed in the attack and was effectively out of a job, which in her case meant she had "no more than three pounds to cover the three months during which she had been ordered not to work." Fortuitously, a cousin and childhood friend of Carey's late grandmother, a Mrs. Honoria Maquisten, saw her name in the papers and offered the penniless girl a room in her London home.

Carey is not the only relative who lives under Honoria's roof: she has two live-in nieces, Nora Hull and Honor King, and two nephews, but only Dennis Harland, a wounded RAF pilot, has a room there – a second nephew, Robert Maquisten, is merely a regular visitor to the place. Finally, there's a starchy nurse, called Magda Brayle, and Honoria's fiercely loyal maid, named Ellen.

What binds this household together, referred to by one of the characters as "the golden link," is Honoria's petulant game of musical chairs with the prospective inheritors of her small fortune.

Honoria summons about twice a month her solicitor, Mr. Aylwin, to do "a little juggling with her will," which she does for no other reason than her own amusement, but everyone is well aware that "some day the music will stop" and "somebody won't have anything to sit down on." Carey soon becomes a favorite in this game of Honoria and is written into her will. However, the situation changes as quickly as predicted, but this time there seems to have been a tangible reason for her change of mind, which came in the form of a hand delivered letter – a letter that made her bristle with anger. Only problem is that her solicitor is abroad and her will is locked away in his safe. So she summoned his managing clerk and "dictated provisions for bequests dividing her property into four," but her comes the kicker, there were "blanks left for the insertion of the names of the legatees." Someone was about to be disinherited, but they did not know who until the document was officially signed and witnessed.

Honoria gave a cryptic hint when "she quoted a proverb about going up with a rocket and coming down with a stick," but somebody refused to allow her to affix her signature to yet another will and tempered with her sleeping draught – making sure "she had about three times the number of tablets she ought to have taken." The person the police holds responsible for this is Carey.

The introduction of the characters, setting up Honoria's death and a short investigation by a rather annoying police-inspector gobbles up the first half of the book, which makes for a very character-driven detective story. Second half finds Carey in court and this portion of the book flip-flops between a good, well-written courtroom drama and a dry, repetitive courtroom procedure that kept going over the same events. Or wanted to assert how angry Honoria actually was upon receiving the letter.

However, the only real problem and weakness of this half of the story is the surprise witness, who popped-up like a jack-in-the-box, which was needed to free Carey and identify the guilty party. I thought that was blemish on the plot and overall story.

Otherwise, Silence in Court was a better story than I expected and feel compelled now to take a third shot at Wentworth. So recommendations are more than welcome.

Stuff of the Dead

"Strange things move beneath the surface of the years."

 - Miss Silver

The names of Patricia Wentworth, the pseudonym of Indian born Doris Turnbull, and her elderly ex-governess turned professional sleuth, Miss Silver, have been sifting in-and out of my peripheral vision for years, but never took the plunge – because the constant comparisons with Agatha Christie's Miss Marple were very off putting. What can I say? I'm just not a fan of the Miss Marple series.

"Wait a moment before going in there, hun..."

Somehow, somewhere, I acquired a 2006 reissue by Hodder and Stoughton of The Benevent Treasure (1956) and I'm fairly sure it wasn't on account of the comely illustration on the front cover. The synopsis on the back, on the other hand, painted a different picture that explained how it might have ended up on the pile and made me finally decide to give Wentworth-Silver tandem a shot.

The Benevent Treasure was published in the twilight years of Wentworth's writing career and the story is driven by undercurrents from the Victorian era, but the plot opens with a prologue – showing a then 15-year-old Candida Sayle clutching for her life to a narrow ledge of an overseas cliff. A young man named Stephen Eversley saves her, but they don't meet again until the following five years have come and gone. An aunt brought up Candida and in turn, she took care of her until she passed away – leaving her all alone until a letter arrives.

Candida's great-aunt, Olivia Benevent, has kept eyes and ears on the estranged side of the family and, as her last surviving relative, invited to spend some time at the ancestral family home – a Victorian monstrosity known as Underhill. The starched Olivia is the typical, domineering shrew who keeps her sister, great-aunt Cara, under the thumb, and generally, acts very, very patrician. There's the adopted secretary, Derek Burdon, whom they hope to marry off to Candido and the servants, Joseph and Anne. Stephen Eversley turns up to do some work on the house. Over this an old-fashioned cloak of family secrecy is thrown, which gives raise to motives for mutual suspicions and perhaps even murder. In the background lingers the legend surrounding the Benevent Treasure, which was smuggled into the country by one of their ancestors, after defecting from Italy, and hidden somewhere on the premise of Underhill. There's even a rhyme that turns up:

"Touch not nor try,

Sell not nor buy,

Give not nor take,

For dear life’s sake." 

The multitude of plot-threads seemed more than sufficient to justify its 350+ pages, at merely a quarter into the book, but when Miss Silver arrives on the scene, knitting in the compartment of train, a Mr. Puncheon asks her if she's in the consulting detective he has heard about. Miss Silver's reputation has preceded her and Mr. Puncheon wants her help in finding out if his stepson, Alan Thompson, former secretary of the Benevents, stole money and jewelry from his employer – before dropping off the map. Everyone, including Mr. Puncheon himself, assumed he was guilty and it killed his mother. Remorseful, Mr. Puncheon now wants to know if there's a chance to clear Alan's name.   

"Super cereal literature!" - Al Gore

Here is where the story begins to bog down and fall apart. The "Had-I-But-Known" atmosphere that permeated through out the beginning of the story disintegrated and the interaction between the characters began to drag down the flow of the narrative. Eventually, there's a murder clumsily disguised as an accident, when someone is found sprawled at the foot of the staircase, but once you reached the ending you realize you could have just skipped there instead of wading to through all that muck. 

The solution obviously owed some debt to Conan Doyle's "The Musgrave Ritual," collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893) and G.K. Chesterton's "The Curse of the Golden Cross," from The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926), but everything seemed tired and a bit on the confusing side of my consciousness – even a last ditch effort at something original with a last-minute murder through an unusual method of poisoning. Well, unusual and original, maybe it would've been in the era that Wentworth attempted to emulate. And that includes a nightly/ghostly intruder in Candida's bedroom and secret passageways.  

After, and it must be said, good opening, I was hoping it would drag itself out the slum and pick up again towards the ending, because the tedious and repetitive family business recalled the slumming drag you had endure in Rupert Penny's Sealed Room Murder (1941) – before rewarding its readers with a short detective story in the final quarter of the book. That didn't happen. Instead, it treaded dangerously close to George Bellairs' The Cursing Stones Murder (1954).

So, no, I did not like it and had I but known that my curiosity for the Benevent treasure would result in the lost of several precious hours, I would never have given that book a second glance!    

To end the review on a positive note (and a spot deification), but mysteries like The Benevent Treasure and The Cursing Stones Murder makes you appreciate later-period John Dickson Carr. The recently reviewed The Cavalier's Cup (1953), published under the Carter Dickson byline, which was deemed as indefensible (because it's mediocre by Carr's own standard), blows those two away and one of them was written in the middle of the authors career! Because that's how great he was. Sorry. That's all I had left in the tank for this review. Writing reviews of books you ended up disliking can be a strain on your creativity.