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My mom has been a fan of Georgette Heyer for a few years now and I have since seen people raving online about how good her stuff is. I felt left out, so when I found this book by Heyer sitting in one of my local Little Free Libraries, I snagged it and read it over the course of a few days when I was down with a bad cold.
I felt pretty “meh” about this book, but that’s probably because it’s a mystery and I’m not normally a fan of mysteries. I wish I had come across one of her romances, but at least now I can say I’ve read something by Georgette Heyer. And I do have to admit it was a very well-written mystery.
One of my only complaints about the book was that the murder didn’t even happen until almost a third of the way through the book, but at the same time, I understand why Heyer did it that way. She was setting up her characters and making the reader understand that almost everyone had a motive for killing this asshole.
The asshole who gets murdered is a wealthy businessman whose wife is hosting a dinner party at their country house. In typical wealthy English fashion, most of the guests end up staying the weekend and planning to leave Monday. The host, Sir Arthur Billington-Smith, doesn’t want to throw the party and does little but complain the whole time about his guests and his wife, Fay, whom he makes sure to verbally abuse every chance he gets.
Fay is in love with another man, Stephen Guest, who is also one of the guests of the party. Guest is in love with her, too, but she insists she can’t live with the shame of divorce and Guest won’t leave her alone, so they’re stuck.
Camilla Halliday and her husband, Basil, also make up the party and are suspects because Arthur and Camilla have been flirting shamelessly with each other the whole weekend.
Then there’s Arthur’s son, Geoffrey, and his new fiancée, Lola, who is a *gasp* Mexican and a professional dancer to boot. Arthur is determined not to like her and she certainly doesn’t do anything to help him change his mind. She is spoiled, selfish, and completely oblivious to other people’s wants and needs. It’s impossible to say what Geoffrey sees in her, but he insists on marrying her, and as a result, Arthur disinherits Geoffrey, which leaves Arthur’s spendthrift nephew (who also makes a few appearances) to inherit everything.
Finally Fay’s spinster sister, Miss Fawcett, and a widow who lives nearby are also members of the party. Although she’s not the narrator, Miss Fawcett is kind of the main character and the only one with a solid alibi for the duration of the time of death window.
The murder takes place some time between eleven a.m. and one p.m. on Monday, July 1, after Arthur went into his study to pay some bills and before he’s found murdered at almost exactly one o-clock. In that time frame most of the guests were assembled on the terrace waiting for lunch to be announced, but every one of them, except Miss Fawcett, left at some point before the murder was discovered.
The local cops bring in a detective from Scotland Yard who talks to all the guests, as well as the staff. It’s worth noting Heyer provides all her characters with a distinct personality, including the servants. They’re not ignored and they’re not just background, and given Arthur’s forceful personality, it’s entirely believable that someone on the staff snapped and killed him.
Arthur was stabbed in the neck with his own letter opener, so it was most likely a crime of passion, rather than premeditated, which is entirely likely given Arthur’s tendency to piss everyone off.
Minor spoiler altert.
The only thing I didn’t get was why the safe had been wiped down. Apparently fingerprinting was already a thing by the time this book was first published (1933), so the first thing they do is dust for fingerprints. The weapon comes up empty, but so does the safe, which should have at least had Arthur’s fingerprints because he used it before he was murdered to put some cash in after returning from the bank. It turns out the safe was in fact robbed, but not by the killer. So why was it wiped of prints? If the murder didn’t happen until after the safe was robbed, the thief would have had no reason to think they’d be a murder suspect, so why bother wiping down the safe?
Overall, I liked this book, not just as something quick and easy to read while I was sick, but also for the characters, and particularly for the portrayal of women, which I suppose should come as no surprise to Heyer fans. I appreciate that Miss Fawcett doesn’t appear to have any negative feelings about remaining single, despite living in a time and place where women were still expected to marry fairly young. This is probably at least partly due to the fact that she has had an opportunity to watch the disaster her sister managed to get herself into by marrying young and without fully considering what she was getting herself into (apparently Arthur managed to be charming during the courtship phase).
By the end of the book, Miss Fawcett is engaged to the inspector who is called in from Scotland Yard to solve the case and I think it’s worth noting that I did not feel this development detracted from her comfort with being single. The inspector was born and raised a gentleman, is well educated and well off, though of course not as wealthy as the late Sir Arthur. But he and Miss Fawcett hit it off from the very beginning and quickly develop a rapport, so it’s clear their personalities are a good match and they will likely live happily ever after.
If you like the Agatha Christie-style country house murders, I highly recommend this one.
What did you guys read this week? Any other authors you had been dying to try?