I was so delighted to have a chance to read this book, newly published by Dean Street Press. Don't worry if you've never heard of Moray Dalton; for a start this is a pseudonym, adopted by Katherine Mary Dalton Renoir (1882-1963). And in addition, though she wrote nearly 30 crime novels between 1929 and 1951, all have been out of print for a long time. The Strange Case of Harriet Hall came out in 1938, and features the series detective of a number of Dalton's novels, Inspector Hugh Collier.
As the story begins we meet Amy Steer, a young girl down on her luck in London. She's been struggling along on part-time work, but the agencies have no more to offer her and she's getting desperate. Then by pure chance she spots an advertisement in the newspaper, asking for relatives of Julius Horace Steer, Amy's deceased father, to make contact. Curious, and with nothing to lose, Amy agrees to meet the advertiser, Mrs Harriet Hall, in the first class waiting room of a large railway station. A large woman, flashily dressed and heavily made up, Harriet Hall tells Amy that she is her aunt, her father's sister, and that she wants to offer Amy a home with her in the small country village of Larnwood. She gives her niece £100 to buy some nice clothes and arranges to meet her at the station in a few days' time. Puzzled but relieved, Amy kits herself out with a wardrobe as recommended by her aunt:
'You'll need a couple of evening dresses and an evening coat or cloak. You'll be dining with the Denes and I daresay you'll be invited to other places...Two or three silk frocks for tennis and a couple of woolly suits and a tweed skirt and jumpers for wet days. Then you'll want shoes for different occasions, stockings, hats --'
Overwhelmed by such opulence, Amy agrees and on the following Monday she boards the train for Larnwood. A young man who gets into conversation with her tells her he is heading for the same place - his name is Tony Dene. They seem to be getting on well,. but when Amy tells him she is going to visit her aunt Harriet Hall, he rushes out of the compartment and doesn't speak to her again. Even worse, when she arrives at the station nobody is there to meet her and she is forced to walk the five miles to her aunt's cottage. Strangely, no-one is at home, though the door is open and the stove still warm. Mrs Hall does not reappear, and the next day Tony Dene, come to visit, finds her body in the well in the garden.
Now the focus shifts to the neighbouring Dene family - the silent, apparently ailing Mrs Dene, Tony and his two sisters, the elder one of whom, Lavvy, has managed to snare a local aristocrat and is planning a grand society wedding. It becomes clear that Harriet Hall had some kind of hold over the family though it's unclear what that might have been, and this puts them in the front of the line where suspects are concerned. Very soon an astonishing discovery puts the whole question of who Harriet Hall really was at the centre of the investigation. Lots of tense moments for the Denes and for Amy before the whole mystery is finally cleared up.
This is a really lively and entertaining book, and comes complete with a full introduction and biographical material. Dean Street Press have brought out several of Moray Dalton's novels, including One by One They Disappeared (1929, and her first in the series) which I've already got and will be reading soon. They are all available as paperbacks or on Kindle, where they are only 99p. Why not give yourself a treat? You won't regret it.