Gossip Girls: Death Starts a Rumor (1940), by Mary Fitt (A Christmas Mystery)

Death Starts a Rumour, published by Ivor Nicholson in 1940, was Mary Fitt's ninth mystery and her fifth in a row with series sleuth Superintendent Mallett.  (Fitts' first four mysteries were non-series.)  There would eventually be eighteen novels in this series, published between 1936 and 1959, plus a collection of short stories, The Man Who Shot Birds, which had Mallett in it.  Mallett's friend Dr. Dudley "Dodo" Fitzbrown (usually just called Dr. Fitzbrown in the later books) I believe debuted in the second novel in the Mallett series, Expected Death, and appeared in most of the rest of the books after that, often contributing more to solving the cases than Mallett, being more imaginative.  

But the truth is, beginning in the 1940s, with such books as Death and Mary Dazill (1941), Requiem for Robert (1942) and Clues to Christabel (1944), Fitt began to focus more on mysteries of character rather than material clues, so that many of her books can be seen as transitional to the modern crime novel.  Both Mallett and Fitzbrown often functioned as much or more as observers as they did sleuths.  

Fitt's publisher advanced Mary Fitt as an
exponent of "cultured crime" who played 
cat and mouse with her readers

With Fitt's very first crime novel, Three Sister Flew Home (1936), critics picked up on her as something different in the crime game and praised her books resoundingly as high-end mystery fare for connoisseurs.  "Excellent characterization" and "Distinguished writing" were characteristic observations of her work.  "A really high-class murder," declared one critic of Murder of a Mouse, while yet another pronounced of Expected Death:"To be recommended to those who like intelligence and style in their crime stories."  Well, who doesn't like intelligence and style in their mystery reading?  Or at least want others to think so?  

Essentially Mary Fitt was being praised in England as a superior writer of clever and insightful manners mysteries, like Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh.  (Dorothy L. Sayers had retired from crime writing by this time.)  Yet Fitt never caught on like those ladies did, either in the United States, where fewer than a dozen of her thirty mystery books were published, or with the even larger market of posterity, being largely forgotten after her death.  

In an entry on Fitt in one of those mystery encyclopedias, crime writer and critic HRF Keating expressed the view that her sleuth Mallett was too featureless for long-term popularity, and certainly there is something to that.  Poirot and Henry Merrivale and other Great Detectives had their entertaining eccentricities, while the posh gentleman aristocrat sleuths had IT, one might say.  

One British woman writer dismissed Roderick Alleyn and Albert Campion and their ilk as the "glamour boy" detectives, but there's no getting away from the fact that they and their love lives made popular reading for many, especially for the burgeoning female mystery readership.  For every sourpuss Raymond Chandler type who loathed them, there probably were five others (three women and two men, or four women and one man) who adored them.

What interior life Mallett ever had I have no idea and I have read a lot of books in the series.  I don't even recall whether he's married.  He's like Agatha Christie's Inspector Battle, except with even less personality.  Dr. Fitzbrown's emotional life does get explored in the early books (and he gets married in Death Starts a Rumour), but then Fitt dropped this as well.  She was more interested in her suspects' emotional lives than in her sleuths.  Which was how it used to be before the glamor boys came along.

Now that Mary Fitt is finally being reprinted in toto for the first time, after six decades of neglect (except for a stray Dover reprint in English), it's time for a reassessment.  On rereading Rumour after two decades I found it quite an enjoyable mystery.  For one thing, it's only 60,000 words or perhaps under, which to my mind is an excellent length for a mystery novel.  I read it over two nights.

Fitt, a classical scholar, loved to use country houses as a stages for her mysteries and in Rumour she gives us not one but two country house parties, at both of which a murder occurs.  It's a very symmetrical construction, as the classical Greeks would have loved.  

The first one commences two days before Christmas but is short-circuited by the sudden death of the homeowner, Evelyn La Planter. Her lazy doctor (not Dr. Fitzbrown) puts down syncope as the cause of death and that is that, but her primary heir, her nephew Michael Le Planter, examines her bedroom after her death and finds clues which point to murder.  However, that would mean the murderer would be one of his friends from the house party and he has been heartbroken in love and is just anxious to go off on an archaeological expedition in Mesopotamia and forget all about it (maybe he's been reading Christie), which is what he does.  

However, over two years later Michael starts getting a barrage of anonymous letters accusing him of having murdered his imperious aunt.  He decides to return and reopen the house and face the rumors head-on.  What better way to do so than by holding another house party where he tries to solve the matter of his aunt's murder (as he and so many others, though not the police, deem it)?  

Of course someone dies at this house party too and this time it's indisputably murder.  

This book reminded me a little of Agatha Christie's Sparkling Cyanide, which appeared five years after Rumour, though Christie's book was partially based on an earlier Christie short story, Yellow Iris, published in 1937, three years before Rumour.  So you can't accuse Christie of snitching any ideas in this case.

Anyway, Fitzbrown is present at the second house party (Michael is aware that he suspected murder the first go-round) and Mallett soon shows up too and actually solves things pretty quickly.  Fitzbrown it turns out is falling in love with one of the party guests--and very quickly too I might add.

Although Rumour is heavily focussed on the characters' emotional lives--much of it deals with who is love with whom and who is going to marry whom or leave whom--there also is some concern with physical clues and the big giveaway in culpritude is definitely the sort of bookish thing you find in Golden Age detective novels. So this one has something in it to please everyone, I think.  

Fitt throws a bunch of characters at us in the beginning and it can be a little confusing at times, but it settles down soon enough.  I hope Moonstone will include a list of characters when this is reprinted. Here's mine:

Evelyn Le Planter, imperious rich aunt and first victim

Michael Le Planter, disgruntled nephew, who loves 

Claudia, biologist (!), who loves 

Alexander Hart, talented former music student who wants to be an Arctic explorer (those were the days) and loves Claudia though he doesn't think she is good for him

Thelma Hyde, who was involved with Michael when he and Alexander and Claudia were students in Vienna and is now interested in Alexander.  She is the ward of 

musicians Victoria and Hubert Hyde, who want to marry Thelma off to 

Professor Edward Warner, an older man and former music teacher in Vienna who is friends with Evelyn Le Planter

Erica Le Planter, niece of Evelyn, a musician who is smitten with Alexander

Paul, a musician who is smitten, seemingly, with both Erica and Michael

Hope that helps!  There are also some servants and a nurse and some charladies who don't feature a great deal but are well handled by the author when they do.  There's a nice little subsidiary mystery about the source of the gossip and a neat ironic ending (Greeks loved irony!) that is not at all the norm in Golden Age mystery.  So, all in all, I have to give this one high marks.