I was supposed to go to London today but I woke up early and found that several more inches of snow had fallen -- it's falling still -- so I rather regretfully cancelled the interview I was supposed to be doing and started to read this book instead. And, in fact, I have just finished it. I don't usually get through things so fast but it was easy reading and once I'd started I thought I might as well get to the end.
I must say at once that I am far from being a fan of Georgette Heyer's Regency novels. I read a few as a teenager but was not all that crazy about them even then, and the few I have tried in recent years have not grabbed me at all. I had no idea she wrote crime fiction until I saw a review not long ago on Random Jottings and discovered that she wrote lots of it. I'm always up for a bit of classic crime so I thought I give her a chance to raise herself in my estimation. Did she? Well, kind of. I certainly found the novel much more readable and less irritating than the Regency ones. This is a classic country house murder mystery, first published in 1937. The novel begins with a death, though whether or not it is a murder is questionable -- Silas Kane falls from a cliff on a foggy night and it may well have been an accident. But Kane was a wealthy man, and when his cousin, and heir, is shot through the head not long afterwards the police are called in and an investigation gets under way. There's a tremendous crowd of possible suspects, ranging from 80 year old Emily Kane through various relatives, servants and business partners. The police are assisted, or at times hampered, by the best character in the book, fourteen year old Timothy Harte, whose obsession with American films and pulp fiction has given him a suspicious mind. Several more murder attempts and many red herrings later the identity of the murderer is revealed. Sadly I had guessed who it was very early on and was in fact rather surprised that neither the family nor the police, who seemed pretty smart on the whole, had come to the same conclusion.
Guessing who did it does rather spoil the fun, of course. But the characters are likeable (or dislikeable where appropriate) and the novel is entertaining enough, and enjoyably full of period detail. So I might try one or two more of these when the mood takes me (or the snow traps me).
