1943 mystery/thriller, sixth in the Miss Silver series. Meade
Underwood's fiancé was thought drowned when their liner was torpedoed,
and now she's living in a flat with her aunt. The man turns up again,
having lost his memory, but can the "fast" actress on the top floor
really be his former wife? vt Miss Silver Deals with Death.
Well, yes, this is—they both are—awfully generic titles that
could really apply to any of the books so far. But Wentworth is still
finding variations on the pattern: yes, Meade and Giles are the
compulsory young couple to be sorted out, but there are eight flats in
this building, only one of them vacant, and each inhabitant has a
story to tell, from the sleepwalking ex-acrobat maid, via the
mysterious Mephistophelean bachelor, to the old lady selling off the
last of her jewellery for another few days' food. Miss Silver is noted
in the background, but doesn't really get involved until after the
murder. (Of the actress, of course, who like Tanis in The Chinese
Shawl seems to have gone out of her way to give everyone a motive.)
And providing a constant Greek chorus is Mrs Smollett ("not one to
talk"), cleaning the flats and observing the lives of the occupants.
I will concede that these books may as others have said lose quality
later in the long series, but at this point I regard Wentworth as
deserving a place in the canon of great crime writers. Not, perhaps,
as brilliant as Sayers, but nobody is; but she is of that style which
is trying to get away from the puzzle-story of Futrelle or Carr with
its timetables and its logical exclusions, and instead examining
questions of whether someone has the right sort of personality to have
committed this particular murder. (There is a timetable here, but
it's not as important as it might appear.) Indeed, as the lead
policeman observes in what I have to regard as the author's voice:
That's where a lot of these detective novels go wrong—there aren't
any human feelings in them. They're clever the same way a game of
chess is clever, or a problem in mathematics, and nobody with any
more feeling than one of the chessmen or the plus and minus signs.
It isn't natural, and it don't do to go jumping to the conclusion
that a man's a criminal because he's got his feelings and they've
been too much for him.
There's also a pleasingly fraught relationship between the police and
Miss Silver: they know who she is, they know that she tends to be
right, but they also know the risks to their careers (and, implicitly,
not to hers!) of following her advice and stirring up a fuss if it
turns out to be unwarranted.
This book is freely available in Canada from Faded Page.