1975 cosy detective fiction; first of Anderson's novels of the Earl of
Burford and Inspector Wilkins. Some time in the 1930s, there's a house
party at Alderley, including the Earl's political brother and the
foreign dignitaries he's negotiating with, an American millionaire
called Hiram, and various others. Nobody is quite what they seem, and
that's even before jewels start going missing and guests start turning
up dead.
This is something of a parody of the English country-house murder
mystery, but it's a parody that clearly comes from a place of love.
There are certainly humorous touches, but they are never allowed to
derail the plot or the characterisation, and there's a perfectly good
technical murder mystery in here as well as the Detective Inspector
who feels he's been promoted above his abilities, and explains: "Don't
expect me to solve anything. I'm not sanguine, not sanguine at all."
In fact it's one of the most complicated murder mysteries I've
encountered, with valuable but distinctly functional firearms, a
stable clock audible throughout the house so that everyone can
remember what time things happened, possible spies, a hugely
sophisticated burglar alarm so that nobody can enter or leave the
house without setting it off, a secret passage, and comings and goings
in the middle of the night narrated by three separate characters and
involving most of the others. I'm not ashamed to say I didn't crack
this one, though I spotted some of the side issues.
Yes, all right, the characters are mostly archetypes, but so they are
in most country-house murder stories. Anderson's enthusiasm for the
genre is always visible, and even at the grimmest moments there's a
sense of authorial enjoyment, of "see what I did there", for which
I'll forgive many more sins than Anderson actually commits. Even the
multi-chapter Gathering in the Drawing Room that makes up most of the
last quarter of the book, in which various people are put in the frame
and then removed from it again, works rather well.
(ObNitPick: there is an error in the matter of the antique pistol,
which couldn't have been produced at the date given, but that's
sufficiently obscure that I think it may even have been deliberate.)
I shall definitely be reading more in this series. Followed by The
Affair of the Mutilated Mink.
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