A Really Big Shoe: Foot in the Grave (1972), by Elizabeth Ferrars

In the great English tradition....
1981 Anglophiliac
US reprint ed. by Bantam

Foot in the Grave may have been the first Elizabeth Ferrars' mystery I ever read.  Certainly it was one of the first, about thirty years ago it must have been.  I remember telling my Mom that I quite enjoyed it and she should too.  This was back when I was looking for other mystery authors besides Carr, Christie and the other British Golden Age Crime Queens.

Foot was originally published in 1972, twenty-two years after Ferrars' Milk of Human Kindness, reviewed here recently.  Both are highly domestic murder mysteries, with events mostly confined to a single middle-class house.  It's not a country house party mystery, to be sure, but the book does have a confined location with a closed circle of suspects, so it really feels like a modest updating of the classic Golden Age mystery.  

The setting is Helsington, an English provincial city that Ferrars used as the locale for several novels in the Seventies.  The protagonist, Christine Findon, is a housewife with no children and a husband, Henry, who is Senior English Master at a local progressive school "where they worry much more about building the children's character than about teaching them anything."  

Six years ago Henry inherited enough money from his father to buy himself and Christine a Georgian house, which as any reader of GA mystery should know, is just the kind of ordered, symmetrical dwelling in which a rational person should want to dwell.  (Golden Agers hated Victorian houses, the abodes of maniacs and victimized women.)

However, when the novel opens, chaos has descended upon the Findon home, and things only get worse as the story progresses, until Superintendent Ditteridge, a series detective Ferrars briefly employed in the Seventies in the Helsington books, solves the various dastardly crimes in the penultimate chapter.  Surprisingly in the Servantless Seventies (and much to her own bemusement), Christine has a housekeeper, an au pair and a daily, respectively:

Mrs. Heacham, the widowed former housekeeper to Henry's father, who has returned from Canada after the death of her husband and desertion by her adult son, Lew, to take up her family post again, although she is not really wanted

Marsha Lindale, a lovely young woman majoring in domestic science in the local college, who refused to accompany her mother and stepfather to South Africa, she, Marsha, being anti-apartheid

and Linda Deeping, a constable's wife who dyes her hair pink but is really traditional at heart

Marsha helps care for two young children, David and Frances, a nephew and niece of Henry, while their parents are out of the country for several months. This was still the time when parents would do that to their nine and six year olds apparently.  (Archie and Agatha Christie went around the world in the Twenties, leaving their young daughter with her grandmother.)

Georgian shoe
or perhaps one of Elton John's

Anyway, then Mrs. Heacham's estranged son Lew shows up, handsome but full of simmering resentment against the Findons for never really making him part of the family.  And there's Henry's charming brother, Simon, a former fiancee of Christine, who pops in too.  

And Christine's old friend Vivien, an academic type who is head of the footwear department of a costume museum in London.  (Think Lucy Worsley, except not at all perky.)  

Vivien, whose third husband, Barry Richmond, by the by, is curator of the London museum, is staying the weekend as Christine's guest to give a lecture on Georgian shoes to the Helsington Costume Society, run by  Christine's matronly friend Minna Maskell, wife of Tony Maskell, wealthy kitchen plastics manufacturer, and mother of Rodney, who is smitten with Marsha.  Got all that?

Whew!  This is a not a long book, and I really have to admire the way Ferrars is able in the short space both to navigate a complex plot and give her numerous characters some life so that you remember them and get engaged in their fates.  Certainly Ferrars has her own stock characters, like all prolific authors.  Vivien resembles Susan, the housewife protagonist's sister in Milk of Human Kindness, in that both are extreme egoists (both on their third husbands too, no less) who push the protagonist around for their own selfish ends.  Charming but erratic Simon reminded me of roguish Felix Freer who would become a later series sleuth of the author's, as well as Sholto Dapple, another character in Milk of Human Kindness (one of Susan's exes.)  These guys always want to play detective (which doesn't mean they can't be murderers too).  

Indeed the two novels as wholes resemble each other to some extent, both in general milieu but also in some specifics, like the fact that murders take place with hammers in storerooms.  (In Golden Age mysteries you want to stay out of the library, in Ferrars it's storerooms you really want to avoid.)  Also there are a pair of young people, brother and sister, in both books though in Foot they are very young children and in Milk very young adults.  

There are some splendid oddities in the book, like someone stealing the left shoes from Vivien's Georgian shoe collection, which she brought with her for her lecture, and some really nice plot twists.  I had forgotten a lot of this book (though not all) in the last thirty years and was able to read it again with much enjoyment.  

To let you know it's the Seventies, Ferrars references long hair and anti-apartheid sentiment, as well as sexual liberation and such things as swinging and foot fetishism (no one besides Vivien is really quite sure what the latter is exactly.)  But things really stay pretty cozy despite the odd murder and theft and ruminations about Mrs. Heacham's and Lew's bitterness against the Findons, which feels like it could have come from a  Ruth Rendell book.  

When you think how many people have read Elephants Can Remember, Agatha Christie's tired, threadbare-plotted and really rather out of it 1972 opus, compared with those who have perused Foot, it seems a shame.  The Ferrars book is much better, as most Christie fans (like me) would admit, I'm sure.

The only real weakness in the novel has to do with motivation, as Bev Hankins has pointed out on her blog.  I think Ferrars could have presented that better at the end, but on the other hand the explanation of the shoe business is really clever and the whole thing is just superbly readable.  In my opinion, Foot in the Grave is a modern classic in the Golden Age style, a splendid updating of the old form from one of the major authors of classic mystery.  Ferrars, you might say, put on a really big shoe (to reference Ed Sullivan) with this one.