Wentworth Wednesdays Putting One's Foot in It: The Blind Side (1939), Patricia Wentworth

Patricia Wentworth published 65 crime novels, 32 of them Miss Silvers and 33 of them not-Miss Silvers. As part of my Patricia Wentworth book project I'm rereading her books and trying to determine how many are true detective novels.  Grey Mask, the first Wentworth Silver, which was published back in 1928, is very much in thriller mode with a fiendish masked master criminal and his gang and an imperiled hero and heroine.  The next three Silvers--The Case Is Closed (1937), Lonesome Road (1939) and Danger Point (1941)--all have thrillerish elements.  However, the next one in the Silver series, The Chinese Shawl, is a classic manners mystery, absolutely a true detective novel and a very good one indeed.  (I hope I'll be talking about it this Silver Sunday.)  

Most of the 28 Silvers published in the series' heyday--the years between 1943 and 1961 (or really 1958)--are true detective novels, albeit with a good deal of romance in the mix.  But Wentworth also had some non-Silvers that are true detective novels, beginning, I believe, with The Blind Side (1939), in which Wentworth introduced her series Yard cops Inspector Ernest Lamb and his posh subordinate Sergeant Frank Abbott.  

The next year Lamb and Abbott would appear in another detective novel, Who Pays the Piper?, then in 1943, the year of the pivotal shift in Wentworth's writing, she would pair the two policemen with Miss Silver is Miss Silver Deals with Death, aka Miss Silver Intervenes.  Ernest Lamb would then appear in a dozen more Miss Silver novels, the last of them The Listening Eye in 1955, and Frank Abbott another twenty including the last in the Silver series, The Girl in the Cellar, in 1961.  

Appearing without Miss Silver in The Blind Side, Lamb and Abbott make a classic English cop team, Lamb being the older, married, more rough-hewn one and Lamb the younger, posher-than-thou public school educated type who started becoming quite prevalent in English mystery in the Thirties.  

A leading example of the "glamor boy" type of Yard man is the King of the Swells, Ngaio Marsh's Inspector Roderick Alleyn.  Then there are posh young detective sergeants like E. R. Punshon's Bobby Owen, John Rhode's Jimmy Waghorn and Freeman Wills Crofts' Rollo.  (I forget the latter's first name, but the surname "Rollo" always seems to indicate poshness in English mystery.)  

Lamb and Abbott are quite enjoyable here, even if they don't manage to solve the case.  This job is left to an amateur, the romantic hero in the tale, which reflects the author's thriller background.  This person is very similar to Wentworth's thriller heroes, a handsome and personable thirty-year-old India Army man named Peter Renshaw.  Practically all the major men in the author's life were Army, particularly India Army, including, from the latter group, her father, uncle and first and second husbands. 

Like Frank Abbott, Peter comes from an elite public school background, just like the men in the author's life.  Indeed, it turns out Abbott and Peter were at the same public school at the same time.  I quote this exchange between Lamb and Abbott, which is apt to provoke snickers today, especially from Americans:

"Well, sir, we were at school together for a bit.  He's older of course.  I--well, as a matter of fact, I fagged for him."

"And you say he's a cool card?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, remember you're not fagging for him now."

Get that, man: none of that Peter fagging!  Abbott's nickname at school was "Fug," so of course Peter calls him Fug throughout the story.  If Peter ever wrote a book about their relationship, doubtlessly he would have titled it My Fag Fug.  

Probably now I should back up a bit and explains just who gets murdered and who the suspects are.  The book is set at Craddock House, the ancestral London home of Ross Craddock, whose father divided the swell place into lucrative flats.  There's an all-important family tree, which doesn't appear until page 75 of the 1991 Warner Books edition I read, page 66 of the Forties Popular Library edition.  These things should always be frontis exhibits in my opinion.  

Death at the Flat

Anyway, at the opening of the novel Ross lives in a flat at Craddock House.  He let additional flats on the same floor gratis to his older first cousins, once removed, sisters Lucy and Mary Craddock, and to Peter, his first cousin.  Mary Craddock has recently passed away and Ross plans to evict her sister Lucy, who makes a habit of butting into his life about his rakish romancing of young, vivacious Mavis Grey, his second cousin and Lucy's niece.  Ross, you see, is something of a wicked man-about-town, don't you know.  Impetuous young stockbroker Bobby Foster doesn't like Ross' avid pursuit of Mavis either.

modern Dean Street Press ed.

Then there is another second cousin of Ross, pretty Lee Fenton, who has this little problem with sleepwalking.  Did she go sleepwalking after falling asleep in Aunt Lucy's flat while reading The Corpse with the Clarionet?  Was it she who left all those bloodstained footprints in Ross' flat on the morning of the murder? Drat!

When Ross gets shot in his flat early one debauched morning, all of his surviving relations, all of whom just happened to be on the scene at various times around the time of his death, are suspects.  Every one of them, it seems, had motives to kill the rich basta--erm, I mean, the poor victim.  

These complicated genteel class cousinly relationships are a staple of Patricia Wentworth novels, but the author also has some good characters of a more modest nature, like proud caretaker and Great War veteran Albert Edward Rush, who doesn't say "sir" to officers of the law, and his bedridden wife, as well as bibulous char Mrs. Green.  

The comic char is a staple, if not cliche, of not only Golden Age detective novels but more recent ones (see Ruth Rendell and PD James, for example); but she's done to a turn here.  And let's not forget that nosy spinster on from a floor above, Miss Bingham--Wilhelmina Ethel to be exact.  Wentworth knew her spinsters.  

This is a very enjoyable detective novel in the classic Thirties style, wryly amusing and brightly characterized with the love interest pretty lightly and pleasingly etched in; and it even manages a surprising ending--at least it was such to me.  Very much recommended.  

I will be interested to see whether the second Lamb and Abbott mystery maintains the standard set by The Blind Side.  And whether they can manage to solve the case themselves.  We know they never got to when Maud Silver was around.