Nancy
Bodington was an English novelist who, under the penname of "Shelley
Smith," wrote fifteen novels of crime, detection and suspense
in "the malice domestic and "badass biddy" subgenres"
– debuting with Background
for Murder (1942) and ending with A Game of Consequences
(1978). I likely would have remained ignorant of Smith's
detective-fiction had it not been for Martin
Edwards and John
Norris regularly praising her work to the skies and back.
Edwards
described Smith as "a writer of genuine ability and
intelligence" and Norris has been "completely under the
spell of this fine writer." They certainly aroused my curiosity
with enticing reviews of Death
Stalks a Lady (1945) and An
Afternoon to Kill (1953), but, as to be expected with these
two reviewers, the books they discuss tend to be hard to get by and
Smith was no exception – until very recently, that is. Over the
past two years, Endeavour
Media reissued all of Smith's crime fiction as ebooks and can now
be easily accessed by everyone.
So I decided
to finally take a crack at one of her novels and picked one of her
more traditionally-structured detective novels.
This
is the House (1945) was described by Norris in his 2016
review
as "a Carribean homage to the British claustrophobic village
murder mystery" and the description of the plot struck me as
Theodore Roscoe's Murder
on the Way! (1935) as perceived by Christianna
Brand. Well, I was not far off the mark!
The backdrop
of the story is the most southerly island of the Windward Isles,
Apostle Island, which has a dusty, ramshackle capital, Wigtown,
that's overlooked by the titular house on the mountaintop – which
is, strictly speaking, not a house. The place is nothing more than "a
plain, square, two-storied villa" standing within the walls of
an abandoned, 16th century Portuguese fortress. A fortress that had
began to crumble into "a picturesque ruin," but Antoine
Jacques, Premier Justice of Apostle Island, used the place as a
foundation for his modern villa.
Jacques
settled down in his fortified villa with his family, but tragedy
struck when his wife, Julia, was struck by a crippling illness that
left her almost completely paralyzed. Julia is a living, bedridden
corpse who can barely move or speak and she wishes to die in order to
end the suffering. A death wish that came true when a visitor came to
the house.
Quentin Seal
is a writer of "surprisingly intelligent" detective
stories with a high reputation among "the more sober and
scholarly fans" of the genre and has come to the island for a
well-deserved holiday, but a friend has given him a letter of
introduction to the Premier Justice of Apostle Island, Monsieur
Jacques. Normally, Seal refused these banal entries in polite
society, but the friend who gave him the letter promised his visit
would be an interesting one and he was not wrong, because, when he
climbed the seemingly endless steps leading up to the house, Seal
makes an unsettling discovery – Julia lies dead in her room. On the
surface, it appears Julia had been accidentally suffocated when the
family cat had entered her room and had fallen asleep on her face.
However, the
postmortem examination failed to find any cat hairs or fur in either
the nose or mouth of the victim. So the doctor concludes Julia had
simply died from a second stroke, which was to be expected, before
the cat had entered her room and the jury entered a verdict of death
by misadventure. An open-and-shut case, but, as Seal becomes involved
with the Jacques family, he observes the ugly aftermath of Julia's
death. An aftermath that turns out to be a prelude for a second,
unmistakable murder.
Raoul Jacques
is the only child of Antoine and Julia, an 18-year-old Lothario,
who's furious when he learns that his mother has left all of her
money to the church and holds Father Xavier personally responsible –
accusing him of having taken advantage of his position to worm his
way into her will. Raoul is egged on and encouraged by his depraved
aunt, Miss Hattie Brown, who believes in "wickedness for its own
sake." Father Xavier suffers a lot of slings and arrows at the
hands of these two devils. The relationship between aunt and nephew,
especially after the death of Julia, becomes a bit creepy at times.
Then there
are the people who live in the house or are, in some way, connected
to the people who live there. Such as Miss Brown's secretive
secretary, Prudence Whitaker, who develops an unusual relationship
with a vagrant beachcomber, Boris Borodin. Lastly, you have the
bailiff of the estate, John Foley, along with his gossipy wife,
Evelyn.
One of these
characters is fatally knifed in a usually unoccupied bathing-hut and
is found, partially undressed, on a shabby, chintz-covered bunk-bed,
which is very suggestive and the answer to this aspect of the plot
was definitely very daring for the time – resulting in a sequence
of events that would probably have shocked some readers at the time.
This murder and its use of sex is what made Norris label the book as "one of the earliest transgressive detective novels."
However, I remember a mystery novel from the 1930s that was as risque
as this one and believe it was John Dickson Carr's The
Four False Weapons (1937), but it might have just as easily
been yet another novel from the thirties.
Seal is asked
by the family to use his talent as a professional plotter to assist
the local police in their investigation and the police on the island
is represented in the figure of Brigadier Napoleon Orage, a black
policeman, who must be a nod towards Arthur
W. Upfield's half-aboriginal policeman, Detective-Inspector
Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte. I refuse to believe that the given
name of the Brigadier is a mere coincidence. Anyway...
Seal plays
his role as amateur detective to perfection and, towards the end,
gathers all of the suspects in a room where, one by one, he begins to
eliminate them before revealing the true identity of the murderer. I
think this gradual process of elimination by showing why most of the
suspects couldn't have committed the murders is a very satisfying way
of lifting the veil. Particularly when the author has conceived a
cunning plot with a cleverly positioned clues and misdirection, which
was definitely the case here. All of the clues were present and the
plot was very clever. The death of Julia Jacques turned out to be a
canny, medical-based murder on par with the central murder from
Brand's Green
for Danger (1944) and part of the murderer's scheme reflected
a certain the plot-element from Roscoe's Murder on the Way! So
my (instinctive) comparison with Brand and Roscoe was right on the
money.
This is
the House is a first-class detective novel with a bodacious plot
and written in the best tradition of the (alternative) Crime Queens,
which comes especially recommended to mystery readers who're enamored
with the work of Christianna Brand. You can bet this title is going
to appear on my best-of list of 2018 and I'll try to return to Smith
before this year draws to a close.
