2015 mystery collection, second in its series though first published.
Lady Hardcastle and her faithful maid Armitage deal with various
matters of murder and theft. Previously published as The Spirit Is
Willing.
In "The Farmer's Revenge", the duo are invited to the bearby
market town. That's quite uneventful, but a week later a local farmer
whom they'd met in passing drops dead over his steak and mushroom pie.
Nobody has a kind word for him, but poison seems like a bit much..
‘I much preferred her when I was ill, Inspector,' she said. ‘She
wasn't nearly so impertinent when she was having to feign concern
for me.'
‘You weren't ill, my lady,' I said. ‘You were injured. And I was
just as impertinent as ever, it's just that the laudanum made you
too doolally to notice.'
"The Ghost of the Dog & Duck" brings us a medium visiting the village,
and accusing (via ghost) an incomer of being a murderer. But why?
"The Trophy Case Case" has the local rugby club's trophy shelf emptied
after a victory celebration, with a great obvious clue. How could the
burglar have failed to notice?
"The Last Tram" gives us Fell Doings in the context of the electric
trams in Bristol.
Anyway, the honourable James is in debt because he loses so very
badly at cards. And he loses at cards because he has the wit and
imagination of an aspidistra. The idea of his coming up with a
solution to his debt problem as radical as murdering his creditor is
absurd.
There are occasional disconcerting references to other cases as though
one were expected to know them; I think this was written and published
before the novel series began, and lightly revised afterwards. But
while the crimes are genuinely puzzling, this is definitely in the
"what fun!" school of detection, and the real joy of it is the
relationship between the principals.