It's always a great joy when a nice fat parcel from The British Library appears in the mailbox. At this time of year it's a bit like an early Christmas present and there are seasonally themed Crime Classics titles in there to help the festive mood. In fact although Death in Fancy Dress is set in the winter months, it's not actually Christmas. But a fancy dress ball in a country manor house is close enough, even if the ball itself has the shadow of blackmail and murder hanging over it to darken the mood.
At the start of the novel we encounter two young men who meet by chance in an Indian bazaar. Tony Keith, a lawyer, is the narrator, and when he and his old school friend Jeremy Freyne make their way back to England, they are approached by the Secret Service in the person of one Edward Philpotts, who asks them to investigate a troubling epidemic:
men and women have been committing suicide with alarming frequency, and its noticeable that they are practically all people in what we term the superior walks of life.
As the suicides are invariably prefaced by mysterious phone calls, it seems certain that blackmail is the cause. Tony and Jeremy are despatched to a grand country house, Feltham Abbey, which appears to have some connection with the epidemic, in the hope that they can discover the identity of the blackmailer, known as the Spider. There's quite a crowd already at the Abbey: Tony's cousin Eleanor, widowed after the death of her first husband, is now married to self-made industrialist Nunn; her pretty eighteen-year-old daughter Hilary, who's being blackmailed; Nunn's lively widowed sister Mrs Ross; and a young man, Arthur Dennis, who is engaged to marry Hilary. There are obviously servants there as well but they don't get much of a mention, apart from the highly efficient butler Hook. Then, just down the road, lives Sir Ralph Feltham, Eleanor's cousin and the actual owner of the Abbey. Sir Ralph is a bad lot with a reputation as a womaniser, and everyone is deeply concerned that Hilary is getting too close to him - he has expressed his intention of marrying her and she refuses to rule out the possibility. To make matters more complicated, Jeremy has decided Hilary must marry him.
Perhaps not everyone would decide to throw a fancy dress ball under these decidedly tense circumstances, but the general feeling is that it will cheer everybody up. The ball is to be an unusual one in that grand expensive costumes are banned - instead guests are supposed to spend as little as possible on dressing themselves up. This leads to a curious confusion in which the dead body of a tramp, found in a local pond, proves on investigation to be that of Sir Ralph, heavily disguised in tattered clothing and expertly applied make-up. So now there's a murder to investigate in addition to the blackmail. Are they linked? Tony and Jeremy put their heads together and come up with a convincing solution - but is it the right one?
There's a great deal to enjoy in this clever, well-written novel. The murder is quite a long time coming, but there's lots of appealing detail and scene setting along the way. The book was published in 1933, when the shadow of WW1 still hangs in the air. The characters are particularly well-drawn - I especially liked the talkative Mrs Ross, who, though neither young nor beautiful, is immensely attractive and, at the ball, is surrounded by a crowd of admirers. Then there's the flighty young socialite Hilary, who goes to the ball in a pair of scanty pyjamas and carrying a teddy bear - under her defensive surface she's suffering from a lot of pressure and her psychological struggles are well observed. And if you appreciate misdirection, there's plenty of it here.
As for the writer of this enjoyable novel, Anthony Gilbert is a pen name assumed by the writer Lucy Malleson (1899-1973). She also published as Anne Meredith and her Portrait of a Murderer (which I've read and enjoyed and believed I'd reviewed but apparently didn't) is another Crime Classic. A bonus in this latest edition is a couple of her standalone short stories. Here's hoping the BL will bring out some of her series featuring what the blurb describes as 'her famed, unconventional, and magnificently named detective Arthur Crook'. I can't wait to meet him!