My 12 Favorite Country House Horror Haunts in Film, from the Thirties to the Sixties, Part 1

The Golden Age detective story is said to have represented an attempt to impose humane reasoned order on an increasingly irrational and cruel world.  (As bad as things seem to some of us today, try imagining what it must have seemed like between the First and Second World Wars to people in the ostensibly "civilized nations," with the rise around the globe of totalitarian regimes in Germany, the USSR and Japan which committed mass murder with modern efficiency.)  Be that as it may, the Golden Age horror story fearsomely envisions the forces of irrationality freed of restraint and let loose, like the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, upon the suffering world. 

Both fiction forms flourished between the wars, and today the two genres often, though not always, appeal to the same people.  Certainly they both appeal to me.  One of the things I wanted to do for Halloween in 2018, with this look at classic films, was to look not at country house mysteries, per se, but at country house horror, often adapted from literary sources.  So, here we go, in chronological order, my favorite vintage country house horror films, from the Thirties to the Sixties. Order may be restored by the end of many of these films, but there certainly is serious travail along the way.

1. THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932)
Source: Benighted (1927), by J. B. Priestley

Won't you come in?
Boris Karloff as Morgan, the butler from hell

The film that gave its name to a whole subgenre of horror films, The Old Dark House is my favorite of the path breaking Universal horror films of the Thirties.  Directed by the brilliant and eccentric Englishman James Whale, the film may not rise to quite the heights of Whale's Frankenstein (1932) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), but it's just so much darn wicked fun. 

Margaret Waverton (Gloria Stuart)
gets a helping hand

Based on British novelist JB Priestley's novel of post-First World War disillusionment, Benighted, and co-scripted by R. C. Sherriff, Great War veteran and author of the tragic and often filmed war play Journey's End, The Old Dark House certainly makes some serious points, like the novel, and has plenteous scares, like Frankenstein.

Yet it's also a darkly funny film, mainly due to the presence of world treasure Ernest Thesiger and Eva Moore, mother of Laurence Olivier's first wife, as those highly eccentric and beyond belief bizarre siblings, Horace and Rebecca Femm.

At their crumbling and drafty old stone house in the rocky Welsh countryside, the Femms are forced to play reluctant hosts, on a dark and stormy might (naturally), to stranded travelers Philip Waverton (Raymond Massey), his beautiful blonde wife Margaret (Gloria Stuart) and their constantly quipping war veteran friend Roger Penderel (Melvyn Douglas).  Soon joining the company are a wealthy north country businessman with a chip on his shoulder, Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton), and his chorus girl chippy, seemingly, Miss Gladys DuCane (Lilian Bond). 

the knives are out at the Femms
Roger Penderel (Melvyn Douglas)

Four Oscar nominees (Gloria Stuart making the roster late in life for her role in Titanic), two of them Oscar winners.  Gorgeous blonde Gloria Stuart in her famous white dress is a sight to behold and a black and white cinematographer's dream, but it's cheeky brunette Lilian Bond, of the two pretty ladies, who touches the heart.  Raymond Massey is a bit stiff (surprise!) but has presence, while Laughton and Douglas are both terrific.

Was this the best assembled for a Thirties horror film, I would think so.  I haven't even mentioned the fearsome drunken, lustful, scarred mute butler Morgan, played so memorably by Boris Karloff.  And, aside from Morgan, there are manifold unmentioned and indeed unmentionable horrors in the old dark house as well, some of which by comparison make Morgan seem almost angelic.  It's like a carnival thrill ride--of terror.

An extraordinary film, in my view, with amazing cinematography and editing and set design.  Don't fault the film for the countless bad imitations over the years, including the 1963 alleged "remake" by horror showman William Castle. However, if you like humor and horror, try Bob Hope's The Cat and the Canary (1939) and The Ghost Breakers (1940) and Abbott and Costello's Hold That Ghost (1944).

2. REBECCA (1940)
Source: Rebecca (1938), by Daphne du Maurier

Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) and the second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine)
Anderson is scarier than Karloff.  Just ask the second Mrs. de Winter.

British novelist Daphne du Maurier's modern Gothic novel was a massive bestseller in the US and it's no surprise that it was quickly adapted into a prestige Hollywood film, by American producer-impresario extraordinaire David O. Selznick and recent English import Alfred Hitchcock no less (and co-scripted by another British emigre, mystery writer Philip Macdonald).  The film won best picture at the Academy Awards and received numerous other nominations, including Actor (Laurence Olivier), Actress (Joan Fontaine) and Supporting Actress (Judith Anderson), though its only other Oscar win was for the splendid cinematography.  (How did Judith Anderson not win, ugh.)

A horror film, you say?  Yes it is.  When the second Mrs. de Winter (Fontaine), a painfully shy, young former lady's companion, arrives at Manderley, a massive Cornwall country mansion, as the new wife of handsome and brusquely charming aristocrat Maxim de Winter (Olivier), she finds that Maxim's ancestral pile is haunted (okay figuratively) by Rebecca, the first Mrs. de Winter, and guarded by a pale gaunt Gorgon dressed in black, housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, who is obsessively and indeed rather scarily loyal to the memory of her former mistress--the bright, beautiful, well-born and now very dead (at least physically) Rebecca.

Dramatic Revelations: Mr. and Mrs. de Winter
(Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine)

In the second half of the film, after an impressive lengthy near soliloquy from Olivier, who was already an old hand at such things, the story takes an unexpected turn and we enter the world of the Golden Age detective novel, with investigations and inquests.  (That wonderful rogue George Sanders, playing Jack Favell, the cad to end all cads--and who better to do so--pops up too around this time.) 

But there are some memorably eerie moments up till then, mostly involving the seriously creepy Mrs. Danvers and magnificent Manderley itself, the superbly designed, seemingly impossibly sprawling de Winter mansion.  And the ending is unforgettable.  For once Alfred Hitchcock, under pressure from the interfering Selznick, was mostly loyal to his source material (though censors did force a significant change) and thank goodness.  This won't be the last we see on the list of Alfred Hitchcock, however.

3. THE UNINVITED (1944)
Source: Uneasy Freehold (1941), by Dorothy Macardle

a spirited discussion
Alan Napier, Ray Milland, Gail Russell, Ruth Hussey

One of the great genuine ghost stories, based on another very popular novel by an Irish novelist, The Uninvited is a  superbly atmospheric spook film, long on charm as well as frights, that was nominated for an Oscar for best cinematography; and it certainly deserved that nomination.  (Why, though, wasn't the score nominated?)  It's a beautifully and eerily filmed ghost tale, with an intriguing and mysterious story as well, one which involves genuine investigation and detection by our heroes, the posh and witty sibling duo Rick and Pamela Fitzgerald (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey). 

In a scenario familiar in both classic detective and supernatural fiction, Rick and Pamela purchase a gorgeous, unoccupied--by humans anyway--cliffside home in Cornwall, for a positive steal of a price--or so they think!  They then befriend a pretty young woman in the nearby town (luminous Gail Russell), whose grandfather owned the house.

Russell's character becomes the love interest of Milland, who was then pushing forty, though she's not even out of her teens,  Meanwhile, 32-year-old Ruth Hussey is stuck with a kindly but dull local doctor who is played by Alan Napier, doomed forever to be known to the world as Alfred the butler from the Batman television series (hope he got residuals), who always manged to look about twenty years older than he actually was.  Here he's actually only forty, but, yup, he could pass for sixty.  Heck, he wasn't much older than Ray Milland,  Maybe they should have paired him with Gail Russell--just kidding!

Anyway, the brother and sister to their discomfort begin to learn, from their sweet, ingenuous neighbor and the kindly doctor, a great deal about the house's very strange--and rather frightening--history.  In addition to the actors above, all of whom give fine performances, there is a memorable Cornelia Otis Skinner in a decidedly Mrs. Danvers-ish role, who holds in her highly capable hands many of the keys to the mystery.

4. DEAD OF NIGHT (1945)
Source: mostly original, I believe, though one story in the film is based on an EF Benson horror story

ventriloquist and friend
Michael Redgrave and Hugo

A hugely influential anthology of tales with a shocking wraparound story (see all those Amicus horror anthologies from the early 1970s), this British film is best known for its disquieting final installment, about a nervous ventriloquist (a superb Michael Redgrave) and his increasingly obnoxious and assertive dummy.  It is creepy as hell (even if the scenario is cliched now), but the film's frame story is decidedly scary too. 

After having a terrible nightmare, an architect (Mervyn Johns) decides to spend the weekend working on renovations he is supervising at a country house.  Once he is sitting down with his client and the client's assembled guests and they share eerie stories (like the dummy story above), he begins to get the uncanny feeling that he is living out the exact events that take place in his nightmare....

This is one that really gets its cold clutching fingers around your throat....

5. THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE (1945)
Source: Some Must Watch (1933), by Ethel Lina White

some must watch

Probably the best film that people think was directed by Alfred Hitchcock but which wasn't directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  In fact it was directed by Robert Siodmak, no slouch himself when it comes to the horror/mystery/suspense genres.  He directed the odd noirish horror film Son of Dracula (1943, set back by the incongruous casting as Dracula of Lon Chaney, Jr.), Phantom Lady (1944), The Suspect (1944), Christmas Holiday (1944), The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945), The Killers (1946), The Dark Mirror (1946), Criss Cross (1949) and, a sort of noir coda, The File on Thelma Jordan (1952). An impressive roster indeed!

With my partiality toward proper British horror (you'll notice that all of the films which I have chosen have British settings so far), The Spiral Staircase may be my favorite Robert Siodmak nail-biter, though all of the films above that I have seen have superb shudder sequences.  Based on (and intelligently altering) British mystery writer Ethel Lina White's ahead-of-its-time crime novel, the adaptation was scripted by Mel Dinelli, who started off writing plays for the classic American radio series Suspense and later did fine film adaptations of Cornell Woolrich (The Window, 1949) and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding (The Reckless Moment, 1949, aka The Blank Wall).

woman with flickering candle dares
the depths of the spiral staircase
an iconic mystery/horror image
(with Dorothy McGuire)

In The Spiral Staircase action is transferred to the United States, to a country house outside a village in Vermont, and moved back in time to the early 1900s, when silent films were coming into vogue but carriages still remained horseless.  It still has a very British feel, however. 

Though the setting is archaic, the film feels path-breaking, for it's essentially a stately precursor of the modern-day slasher film (aka Halloween, Friday the 13th, etc.)  It seems there's a mad serial killer (and very early in the film we at times see things from this person's point-of-view) running loose in and around the town, slaying women with physical disabilities. This is bad news for shy, pretty Helen (Dorothy McGuire), who works as a domestic servant/companion to the bedridden but still decidedly peppery Mrs. Warren (Ethel Barrymore), widow of an outsize big game hunter.  (Her bedroom is decorated with elephant tusks and a lion skin rug.) 

Sweet young Helen, you see, is mute, though her condition, we learn, is actually more psychological than physical.  (Dorothy McGuire, a natural for such roles, gives a very good performance.)

Also living at the house are: Mrs. Warren's callow and quippy blond playboy son (back from Paris), Stephen (Gordon Oliver); her stolid dark-haired professor stepson, Albert (George Brent); the professor's pretty live-in secretary Blanche (Rhonda Fleming, still with us, bless her); put-upon Nurse Barker (Sara Allgood); and Mr. and Mrs Oates (Rhys Williams and Elsa Lanchester), the domicile's cook and handyman.  And then there's the mild village constable (James Bell) and Dr. Parry, the kindly, handsome physician who seems to have his eye on Helen while he attends Mrs. Warren. 

With all these people around, Helen can't be in any danger, can she?  Think again!

some must cease

Ethel Barrymore received a supporting actress Oscar nomination for this film, and like McGuire she's very good, though all of the above players range from competent to terrific. 

Elsa Lanchester, though comparatively underused in the film, is such a treat, and George Brent, who usually seems quite forgettable in his films (at least when he's beside Bette Davis), is actually memorable here.

Good as well is the ever-reliable mild "nice guy" B-film leading man, Kent Smith, most known to people today as the object of twisted affection in Val Lewton's and Jacques Tourneur's superb shocker Cat People (1942).  He also has a good part in Joan Crawford's underrated noir The Damned Don't Cry, 1950, and his first film appearance was in the SS Van Dine mystery The Garden Murder Case in 1934.) 

Blink and you'll miss Hitchcock favorite Ellen Corby, who would secure a supporting actress Oscar nomination in 1949 and achieve fame in the 1970s as Grandma Walton in The Waltons television series, and the killer's unblinking eye is played by...well, ask me in the comments if you don't know!

Perhaps there is too much "love interest" for some in this short film, but the last 20 minutes or so is superbly scary and overall it's a very smart script in my view.  Making the heroine mute (she emphatically is not in the book) was a stroke of genius, I think.

6. DRAGONWYCK (1946)
Source Dragonwyck (1944), by Anya Seton

life at Dragonwyck offers many surprises--many of them unpleasant
(Vincent Price and Gene Tierney)

This film seems not as well known as it should be today, I'm not sure why.  It's a terrific period Gothic film, sumptuously set and shot and with a powerful performance by the leading man, Vincent Price.  There's mystery, murder, madness and ghosts--and did I mention Vincent Price?

For me, growing up as a kid in the 1970s who loved vintage horror films, of course I was well-familiar with Vincent Price.  But at that time he was a genial, campy elderly veteran of television.  Oh look, there's Vincent Price guest starring with Don Ho on that Brady Bunch two-parter (or was it a three-parter?) in Hawaii!  (Don't wipe out, Greg!)  Hey, there he is on The Donny and Marie Show!  I'm surprised Price wasn't in the Star Wars Christmas Special.  (Wait, was he?)  Well, at least he got to do that spooky rap on Michael Jackson's hit song and video Thriller, that is pretty damn cool.  I remember him talking about it on The Tonight Show when Joan Rivers was subbing for Johnny Carson.

Not being a great fan of all those William Castle and Roger Corman drive-in shockers which titillated kids in the Fifties and Sixties, for which Price became best known, I never really saw anything he was in that seemed actually scary to me until I saw those two Dr. Phibes films from the 1970s, which were full of the colorful mod style of The Avengers television series, episodes of which director Robert Fuest also directed.  (I forgive him for giving us The Devil's Rain and Ernest Borgnine as Satan.)  Vincent Price was larger than life, and these cheeky but stylishly gory films work, for me anyway.

You have to go earlier in Price's career for the fine "serious" film performances (well, there was that very late turn in the tad slumberous The Whales of August, with Bette Davis and Lilian Gish).  He's good in the classic mystery Laura (1944) and the melodrama Leave Her to Heaven (1945), but those are actress Gene Tierney's films, not his.  However, Dragonwyck, another Forties film which he did with Gene Tierney, sees Vince stealing scene after scene from his gorgeous gal co-star.

tyrannical yet tormented

When Dragonwyck starts, it is 1844.  Miranda Wells (Gene Tierney)--a simple young God-fearing Connecticut farm girl--  after persuasion of her puritanical father is taken to live with her fabulously wealthy distant cousin, Nicholas Van Ryn, who resides in splendor with his wife, Johana (Vivienne Osborne), at their opulent New York Hudson River estate, Dragonwyck.  The Van Ryns want Miranda to look after the couple's young daughter, Katrine. 

At first Miranda is awed and thrilled with her new surroundings, but she starts to finds things at Dragonwyck decidedly...strange. Nicholas and Joahana's relationship doesn't seem quite...right.  And what is it about all the white oleander in the house? And just who is playing that haunting harpsichord tune in the dead of night?

Oh and there's some political stuff about the Van Ryn estate tenants and their dissatisfaction with their rents (Harry Morgan, later of M*A*S*H, pops up here) and there's that kindly young democratic doctor neighbor, Jeff Turner, played, woodenly, by Glenn Langan (Kent Smith where were you?).  Just how many kindly doctors were in these films, anyway?  But let's get back to Vincent Price.

As a leading man Price was banished to horror films, the point of no return being that string of popular sci-fi and mystery horror flicks he made in the late Fifties (The Fly/The Return of the Fly/The House on Haunted Hill/The Tingler/The Bat).  Hollywood just didn't know what to do with him as a "straight" leading man, seemingly, though Dragonwyck showed the way, had it but been heeded.  (Glenn Langan's dull Dr. Turner can't be taken seriously as a leading man.) 

Price makes a magnificent Byronic hero/anti-hero type, proud and regal, autocratic and aristocratic, defiant yet tormented. Price and his second wife were, incidentally, great friends indeed of Hugh Wheeler, who, as readers of this blog will certainly know, was one-half of the Patrick Quentin mystery writing team.  What a shame Price was never cast in a Patrick Quentin film!

Mary Grant Price, Hugh Wheeler and Vincent Price in Tijuana, Mexico in 1950
four years after Dragonwyck

Dragonwyck was the first film directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, who was soon to win back-to-back directing Oscars for A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950).  His last directing Oscar nomination was for the classic mystery film Sleuth (1972, with Laurence Olivier again and Michael Caine.

Well, that's all for now.  Come back to visit the rest of the haunts I've chosen for you--if you dare!!  Be warned, it's a dark and stormy night....

All That Glitters Is Not Gold: Felicity Worthington Shaw, aka Anne Morice (1916-1989), and Her Life in Crime Fiction

Between 1970 and 1990, Anne Morice published 25 detective novels (the last of them posthumously).  All but two of them were part of the Tessa Crichton series, Tessa Crichton being a professional actress and lighthearted though pertinacious amateur sleuth.  After 1973 all of the Anne Morice mysteries were published in both the UK and the US, and in the latter country a few titles were reprinted in pb in the Eighties by Bantam, as part of their "Murder Most British" series, which included such stalwarts from both past and then-present as Agatha Christie (at the time Bantam controlled the American copyrights to nine Christie titles), Ruth Rendell, Margery Allingham, Patricia Wentworth, Dorothy Simpson, Catherine Aird and Elizabeth Daly. 

Not bad company I would say!  Morice earlier had joined additional distinguished company when she became a member of the Detection Club in 1976, the same year as Margaret Yorke and a year before Ruth Rendell, not to mention two years before Reginald Hill. 

Despite this onetime seeming popularity, however, Anne Morice's novels are out-of-print today and there are very few posts about her writing on the internet, with practically nothing on her life.  (Even her given birth year, 1918, is mistaken.)  This is surprising not merely because at one time in the recent past she was a fairly popular author, apparently, but because her family background was rather interesting indeed.

The author was born Felicity Anne Worthington Shaw in Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, on February 18, 1916 (not in 1918, as book sites commonly state).  Her parents were Harry Edward Worthington (1867-1936), a "respected and loved" village doctor, and his rather younger wife Muriel Rose Morice (1881-1956).  Besides Felicity, the couple had three other daughters: Elizabeth (born 1907), Angela Muriel Darita (born 1912-1999) and Yvonne (born 1918).

All seemingly a pretty unexceptional provenance for an English mystery writer--yet in fact Felicity's complicated ancestry was like something out of a classic English mystery, with several cases of children born on the wrong side of the blanket to prominent sires and their humbly born paramours.

Her father Harry Worthington was the son of George Fitch Jennings Worthington, an apothecary and boardinghouse keeper, who in 1868 authored the earnest guide Bathing: Its Uses and Advantages, Shewing When and How to Bathe.  However, his wife Muriel Rose had a much more vivid story. 

Muriel Rose Morice was the natural daughter of Charles John Morice, a Harrow graduate and footballer who played in the 1872 Scotland/England match.  He later became a stockbroker, like his father Charles Walter Morice, his brothers and his nephew Percy John de Paravicini, son of Baron James Prior de Paravacini and Charles Morice's only surviving sister, Valentina Antoinette Sampayo Morice.  Baron de Paravicini and his family resided as Riverside House in Datchet, Berkshire.  (Actress Billie Whitelaw owned the house on the Sixties.)

Riverside House, Datchet, Berkshire, home of Anne Morice's great-aunt
Baroness Valentina Antoinette Sampayo Morice de Paravicini.  Whew!

Charles Morice's grandfather, John Morice, was a Scottish merchant who settled for a time in Lisbon, Portugal, where he married Charles' and Valentina's mother, Marie Valentine O'Neill.  I'm guessing that through marriage there was a good deal of Catholic blood in this family.

Footballer Charles Morice played the fields of romance as well.  Two years before the 1872 Scotland/England football match, he fathered with Clementina Frances Turvey, daughter of  coachman George Turvey, a son, Charles Ernest Turvey. It was not until three decades later, apparently, that the couple finally would marry (in Ireland), after Clementina had borne another son with Charles, in 1893, whom the couple named William Charles Morice.

In between these two births, another child was born to Charles Morice, the aforementioned Muriel Rose Morice, mother of Felicity.  Like her half-brothers, Muriel Rose was of natural birth, being the daughter of Rebecca Garnett Gould, a dressmaker who was the daughter of Yorkshire tailor Joseph Garnett and the widow of schoolmaster George Richard Cambermere Gould.  Rebecca passed away just four years after Muriel Rose's birth, leaving Muriel to be raised by her half-sister Katherine "Kitty" Gould Richardson, who recently had wed a commercial traveler. (Many years later, in 1914, two years after the death of her first husband, Kitty would make a prestigious second marriage, wedding Alfred Douglas-Hamilton, a connection of the Dukes of Hamilton.)

Frederick Lonsdale
National Portrait Gallery, London

Muriel Rose lived with her half-sister Kitty in Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, where she met local doctor Harry Worthington when Harry was treating her for measles.  The couple wed in 1904, when she was 22 and he was 36.  (Not content with the actual substantial age difference, Muriel Rose later falsely told people, including her daughters, that she was 30 years younger than Harry.)  Together Harry and Muriel Rose had a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1907, but Muriel Rose's later three daughters--Angela, Felicity and Yvonne--were fathered by another man, a fact later related by Angela in a tell-all book (more on this book below).

All through the 1910s Muriel Rose, the "pretty little wife" of Birchington's beloved village doctor, carried on with other men, the most steady lover of whom was the married London playwright Frederick Leonard Lonsdale (1881-1954), author of On Approval, The Last of Mrs. Cheyney and other popular stage works, many of which were later adapted as films.  Supposedly Fredrick originally had attempted a seduction of Muriel Rose's beautiful elder half-sister, Kitty, only to have her advise him to "Go and amuse the little sister."  He promptly did so--and how!

With his increasing stage success in the Twenties, Frederick's interest in Muriel Rose evaporated, however.  He arranged for his secretary to send his cast off lover 100 pounds annually for each of his illegitimate daughters, provided the two never met again.  Angela Worthington vividly and somewhat bitterly recalled the result:

His offer was accepted.  From that moment forth my mother canceled out love from her life.  She taught us that men have no feelings whatever and that they never, never, never speak the truth about anything (unless they are good and unattractive like Harry, and that does not count).  The man she had loved had proved a bastard, and didn't give a damn about the Love Children.  He didn't either.  I have never had a kiss from a mother or father. 

As this suggests, the Worthington girls lived rather strange lives.  The three younger daughters had not much to do with their elder half-sister Elizabeth, who had been sent to a "rotten boarding school which she loathed."  They were permitted to leave their nursery only by permission of their Nanny, Angela recalled: "Mummy was not going to have small children 'rampaging around the house.'  Even then I knew this was because she 'entertained' in her pretty bedroom on the floor below." 

Later in life their wayward mother explained to them that "Poor Harry's impotent, you know....He can't do it--Thank God!"  Inconveniently for Muriel Rose, daughter Angela explained, she "needed men physically," though "for a woman of her class, that was something to be deeply ashamed of.  And affairs could be very messy, especially in a small, tight community like Birchington."

Muriel Rose seems to have been a woman of golden flights and fancies, who couldn't be satisfied merely with her life with an impotent, unattractive (though happily well-off) husband whom she didn't love.  She wanted something more dazzling out of life.  At some point she had adopted a suggestive new name for herself, Lucy Glitters.  She told her girls that her father, Charles Morice, had christened her with this appellation on account of his having won a bet on a horse by that name on the day she was born. 

Jesus in the nursery
He is meek & he is mild
He became a little child

This all sounds highly romanticized (apparently the girls never knew their mother's name was really the prosaic Muriel Rose), but in fact there once indeed was a pedigree English racehorse named Lucy Glitters, who had been born four years before Muriel Rose.  Presumably the horse had been named for the character "Lucy Glitters" in R. S. Surtees' popular novel Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour (1853), wherein the title character weds Lucy Glitters, a former showgirl who is, in Surtees' memorable words, "tolerably virtuous."  Lucy Glitters does seem a better appellation for the well-admired wife of Dr. Worthington than Muriel Rose.

Yet all that glittered was not gold.  There were what Angela called her mother's "black rages" when her bright romantic fantasies were dashed.  Angela recalls a day when she

must have been making some tiresome noise in our nursery.  This more often than not exceedingly charming and amusing woman [Lucy Glitters] appeared at the door in her dressing gown, seized me violently and, pushing me ahead of her, hit me repeatedly on the head.  I fell down the stairs to the landing, finally hurting myself quite badly, on an oak chest on which she had carefully arranged her willow pattern china. 

Worse yet came when the girls' nanny was sacked. Nanny Bowler was a devout Chapel-going Wesleyan Methodist.  "God-fearing, goody-goody, wispy and delicate," recalled Angela, Nanny Bowler placed pictures in the nursery of Jesus Christi which depicted the Christian savior as a "droopy, rather colourless man, draped in a white sheet, clutching a lamb.  He had a sickly-sweet expression and a halo." 

Nanny adored Jesus and Dr. Worthington but held the doctor's wife in rather lower estimation.  Faithful to the doctor's dictates, Nanny took the girls swimming every summer.  (Dr. Worthington seems to have been influenced by his father's bathing pamphlet.) Although she thought salt water bathing "a lot of nonsense," Nanny, Angela in tow, would pack Felicity and Yvonne "into the pram along with buckets and spades, towels, bathing costumes, warm clothes to change into and Petit Beurre biscuits, and [with them] set out for Minnis Bay and the beach."

Nanny got the sack when Angela was around seven, after Nanny had a "blazing row" with Lucy Glitters below the staircase to the nursery over Lucy's "continuing infidelities."  It was not merely another day of "black rage," however, but

also a day of growing up, of being aware for the first time of other people's misery, and for the first time of feeling affection for Nanny, even gratitude, compassion, if you like.  I decided in a moment that I, too, would get out, but voluntarily, and as soon as I could.  I felt impotent fury toward my mother, and throughout my childhood, that never quite left me. 

It was at Quex Park, the "Big House" in Birchington-on-Sea, that Angela found out she was "illegitimate," when she overheard (and was meant to overhear, she thought) a conversation between the mistress of the house, Hannah Powell-Cotton, and her girls' nanny, in which the nanny exclaimed of Angela, "Well, of course she's difficult, isn't she, illegitimate and all that?  Mr. Lonsdale, her father, doesn't even work!  Poor Dr. Worthington is what we all say."

Major Powell-Cotton of Quex Park,
African explorer and big game hunter.
The Worthington girls pretended that
he was secret Service

Quex Park was owned by celebrated English explorer and hunter Major Percy Horace Gordon Powell-Cotton, creator of the Powell-Cotton Museum, located on the grounds of Quex Park.  Of the Major Angela recalled that he "had a beard and we hardly ever saw more of him than a glimpse, a detached smile: I would pretend to myself that he was Secret Service."  She remembered the Major's museum too, as well as an even more frightful exhibit, the Major's wife:

Major Powell-Cotton had an amazing museum full of wild animals he had shot and stuffed: elephants, lions, tigers, hippos, crocodiles, giraffes--nothing had been spared....The Major [also] had a huge, beautiful, patronizing wife called Hannah and I wished that he had shot and stuffed her too.

Ouch!  Considering that the Powell-Cotton daughters, Diana and Antoinette, contemporaries of Angela and Felicity,  were still alive at the time (1986), this was a pretty blunt comment.

Angela had a better opinion of neighbors Gladys Cooper, the noted stage (and later film) actress, and the influential actor-manger Gerald du Maurier, father of future bestselling author Daphne, who was a bit older than the Worthington daughters and proved a rather remote girl:

I remember Daphne du Maurier as a small girl as if she were in my garden now, with her wonderful blonde hair and straight, slim body.  She invariably dressed in an emerald green stockinet pullover and shorts but never played with the rest of us: always, when I recall her, she is lying face down in some long grass, reading, never talking, never joining in, always reading.  Her sisters, Angela an Jeanne, were fairly friendly to me.

du Maurier sisters (Daphne on left)
neighbors of the Worthington girls, three of whom, including
Felicity Worthington (future mystery write Anne Morice),
were actually daughters of playwright Frederick Lonsdale

In the 1920s, after  "poor Dr. Worthington" began exhibiting symptoms of Parkinson's Disease and he had been packed off by his wife to a "tiny cottage on the Powell-Cotton estate," attended by a nurse, "a huge woman in a pleated white bonnet," Lucy Glitters, now in straitened financial circumstances (by her standards), moved with her daughters to a maisonette above a cake shop in London at 16a Lower Belgrave Street.*

*(This was located very close to the address of the notorious 1974 Lord Lucan murder.)

According to Angela, Lucy Glitters' move to Belgravia was a daring gamble "to help her daughters achieve what she believed to be their rightful position in life":

"In private she would still yell and scream and lambast us for being lazy, irresponsible and ill-mannered, but [in public] she exercised great charm" and she gave the girls a "really inspiring sense of the enjoyment of day-to-day living, no matter what the problems were."  Angela could well imagine people saying of her mother, "you could almost say the mother was a lady."

Angela went into acting for a profession, and her mother's theatrical ambition for her is said to have been, though in her memoir Angela doesn't discuss the matter, the inspiration for Noel Coward's amusingly biting 1935 song "Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington":

The profession is overcrowded
And the struggle's pretty tough
And admitting the fact
She's burning to act
That isn't quite enough
She has nice hands
Give the wretched girl her due
But don't you think her bust is too
Developed for her age?
I repeat, Mrs. Worthington
Sweet Mrs. Worthington
Don't put your daughter on the stage

The greatest contribution to acting made by this "wretched girl" Angela came when she married Robin Fox and became the mother of actors Edward (1937) and James (1939) and film producer Robert (1952).  I remember Edward Fox quite well from 1970s films, having as a child been taken by my father to see the classic crime thriller The Day of the Jackal (at the age of seven!) and, five tears later, the sprawling war epic A Bridge too Far.  (In the latter film Fox and Anthony Hopkins made the greatest impression on me out of the huge all-star cast; having recently re-watched the film, I well see why--Fox deserved his BAFTA award for this role, even if it was essentially for one bravura scene.) 

In the 1980s I recall James Fox in the pivotal role of the school superintendent and decent Englishman Richard Fielding in David Lean's adaptation of EM Forster's A Passage to India.  Christie fans should also recall Edward Fox, superbly droll, as the butler Gudgeon in the 2004 adaptation of the Hercule Poirot mystery The Hollow.  And Colin Dexter fans that James Fox is the father of Laurence Fox, aka Sergeant Hathaway in the Lewis mystery series.  Interestingly Laurence Fox attended Harrow like his noted footballer and stockbroker great-great-grandfather, Charles Morice.

I had no idea, when I first read an Anne Morice mystery back in the 1990s, that the late Anne Morice, aka Felicity Worthington Shaw, was an aunt of the Fox brothers.  Angela Worthington Fox details much of this is her first volume of memoirs, Slightly Foxed (though a good bit of the above is not in the book).

a Fox as the Jackal

Although Felicity, in contrast with her sister, eschewed the acting profession, she married a director, Anthony Shaw, and like her sister had three children.  After writing a couple of mainstream novels, she successfully turned to mystery writing in 1970, when she was 54 years old.  It's not surprising given her family history that her lead character was an actress.  More soon on Felicity and some of her crime fiction!

Poisoned Apple: A Taste of Power (1966), by W. J. Burley

"But are the police the best people to investigate a thing of this sort?...I was thinking of Dr. Pym...."
Sanders swore as the lighted match burned down to his fingers and he dropped it on to the carpet.
"Pym?  you mean Henry Pym?"
"You know him?"
Sanders laughed.  "Who doesn't?  His father was my tutor at Oxford.  But he wouldn't do it, the man's almost a recluse."
"He's been mixed up in one or two murder cases."
"So I've heard--he's a friend of some big noise at the Yard--but this is quite different!  The very idea is absurd!"

"Yes,"  Henry agreed.  "What fascinates me is the arrogance of these schoolteachers.  It's so ingrained they don't even know it's there."

--A Taste of Power (1966), by W. J. Burley

Silver Age crime writer W. J. Burley (1914-2002) has been dead for 16 years, the last of his 23 Superintendent Charles Wycliffe detective novels having been published three years earlier in the year 2000.  (The fittingly titled Wycliffe and the Last Lap was left unfinished at the author's death at the age of 88.)  A television series  based on the Wycliffe books was aired originally in the 1990s and the Wycliffes are still in print today; but how much read is Burley now, I wonder? 

Despite this laudatory 2006 piece on the late author from Martin Edwards, a fellow fan of his work, I don't get the impression that a great many people are reading Burley these days.  If this is so, I think it's a shame, as Burley should qualify, in my view, as one of the more notable British mystery writers from the last third of the 20th century.  Personally I like the body of Burley's work  better than that of the late PD James (sacrilege!), just as I prefer Burley's Wycliffe to James's Adam Dalgliesh. 

Although Burley became identified with Wycliffe, he first detective novel, A Taste of Power, saw the debut another detective, Dr. Henry Pym.  While Wycliffe, who debuted in the oddly-titled Three-Toed Pussy two years later, is an archetypal example of the introspective (if not depressive) police detective so popular today, Dr. Pym is a deliberate throwback to the brilliant amateur detective from the golden days of detective fiction yore and his investigations are exercises in classic fair play ratiocination.

In his second of three careers, Burley, a native of Cornwall (where the Wycliffe mysteries are set) became a schoolmaster, teaching biology for two decades at Newquay Grammar School.  (He retired in 1974, I presume because due to his success at crime writing.)  Not altogether surprisingly, then, Burley's first detective novel is a school mystery, and a very good one at that.

A Taste of Power belongs to that great body of British mysteries that portray primary/secondary schools as natural places for murders.  (I don't believe that college mysteries are nearly as depressing a body of work.)  Reading this novel I was reminded of books like Christopher Bush's acerbic Golden Age classic, The Case of the Dead Shepherd (1934) (recently reissued by Dean Street Press), Leo Bruce's gloomy Death at St. Asprey's School (1967) and Robert Barnard's sardonic Little Victims (1983). 

Not coincidentally, these three latter authors all taught school as well at one time or another and all of them hated it (though Barnard was a college professor, and in his books he blasted colleges as well--along with many other things). Are women teachers turned crime writers as sour on primary/secondary education as a vocation?  Gladys Mitchell and Elizabeth Lemarchand were not. (See Lemarchand's contemporaneous girls school mystery, Death of an Old Girl.)

Had Burley turned on teaching by the mid-Sixties, when he was writing Power?  I don't know, but he takes pains in a prefatory note to explain to readers that "My teaching colleagues have been, generally, pleasant and patient people, but it is very difficult to write stories about pleasant and patient people."

And, to be sure, the teachers at the coeducational Huntley-May Grammar School fit the bill when it comes to coeducational unpleasantness.  Someone is sending poison pen letters to teachers and students alike, making all sorts of nasty allegations.  Sensing that the faculty has reached an emotional crisis of backbiting and stabbing yet chary of involving the police, Headmaster Tristram-Jones, a relatively new arrival to the school, seeks the help of amateur detective Dr. Henry Pym.  But of course!

Pym is that mythic fictional figure, the Great Detective, endowed with independent means and strange fancies, which the author, fully conscious of the tradition in which he is working, takes time to detail at some length:

Henry Lancaster Pym, M.A., D.Phil., D.Sc....was the sole survivor of an ancient and wealthy family, and despite the ravages of death duties, he was still extremely well off.  It was said that he could lay claim to a peerage had he been so minded and Henry would have been the last to deny such a rumour.  But the Pyms were of a scholarly bent.  Henry's father, now dead, had been a fellow of a minor Oxford college.  He had believed himself to be an authority on fifteenth-century England and had written a very bad book on the Wars of the Roses, which a critic had described as a "rather belated propaganda for the House of Lancaster."  It was this partisan foible of Pym Senior which gave Henry his baptismal name and cast a blight on his formative years.

Georgian slip-ware teapot (see antiques atlas)

Resultantly hating history, young Pym went to Oxford to read zoology, which he loved, all the while finding zoologists themselves "impossible." So at the age of 30, Pym, relying on his private means, retired to a village in Cornwall, taking up residence at a house he had built called "The Labyrinth." 

There in splendid and eccentric isolation he continued his zoological studies, establishing himself as an authority on chilopods and diplopods (centipedes and millipedes); and carrying on a wide range of secondary interests, including "gardening, English water colours, horseracing, seventeenth-century English slip-ware, Restoration drama, music and criminology."

There's more, but you get the idea.  In writing Power, Burley was going for a full-fledged eccentric genius amateur crime solver, and he succeeded with such in my estimation.  Pym also has a manservant, Perkin, and a pretty young secretary, Susan, who accompanies him on his sleuthing excursions.  Susan is required to wear dresses rather than slacks in Pym's presence, an edict she challenges but to which she ultimately complies.  She does get to call her boss by his first name though. Hey, it was the Sixties.

I didn't sense that there were carryings-on between employer and employee--how would Henry Pym have time for hanky-panky with all that attention lovingly devoted to slip-ware and watercolors?  The chauvinistic tang of this again recalls classic mystery, though the best character in the book is a middle-aged woman teacher in my estimation.

Tristram-Jones is able to get Pym to emerge from Cornwall to search for the poison pen writer (assisted by Susan), but it's not long after Pym arrives that a suspicious death takes place among the faculty, when one of the schoolmistresses is found dead at the bottom of a cliff.  Accident, suicide or...murder???  What do you think?

I found A Taste of Power a fine mystery, with some excellent examples of true detection, something that was becoming increasingly rare in mysteries of a a half-century ago.  (Authorities Barzun & Taylor agree.)  For those who like detection with some dramatic content, there is also an interesting, if somewhat depressing, view as well of middle-age and midlife crises, with the portrayal of proud and able though variously thwarted people suffering from mounting fear that the lives which they had wanted for themselves have eluded them, perhaps irrevocably.  It's a view I've encountered before in English school mysteries, written by English mystery writers who seem to have been rather relieved for their own parts to have left teaching behind them.

Dr. Pym would appear in one more detective novel (where his interest in slip-ware would prove useful) before W. J. Burley irrevocably abandoned him for in favor of his cop Wycliffe.  Without meaning to cast shade at the excellent Wycliffe series, I feel that this was a mistake artistically.  However, the times were not so very understanding and tolerant of odd and privileged amateur sleuths.   Wycliffe became a prototype of the modern fictional police detective, while Pym was cast aside and largely forgotten within a few years. (Marvel Comics fans will know that Pym shares his name with the superhero, a member of the Avengers, known variously in different guises as Ant-Man, Giant-Man, Goliath and Yellowjacket.  This Dr. Henry Pym debuted in comics in 1962.)

Unfortunately, A Taste of Power is out-of-print today, and pretty rare, as it was never published in the US. It is certainly worth seeking out, however, for fans of a classic detective fiction--particularly  that frequently dark and gloomy subgenre, the English school mystery.

English watercolor (courtesy Passing Tramp)

The Art of Detection: Murder of an M.P.! (In Search of a Villain) (1927), by Robert Gore-Browne

"Have you noticed," [Lucien Clay] asked us as he bent over his packing, "that while films are quite untrue to Life, Life is very often true to films?"
    I confessed that I had not.
    "At Lincot, for instance, you might have been living inside the brain of a Hollywood movie magnate.  [Sir Arthur] Baxter would have been his beau ideal of an Old English country gentleman.  In reality he was a very average die-hard back-bencher.  Only a communist would have taken him seriously, just as he took communists seriously.  He was a precise, rather fussy man, but not to the point of murder."
    "He was a J.P.," I remarked, "and did valuable service on various boards."
    "I dare say," said Clay. who seemed to like to monopolise the conversation, "he hadn't much to do."

    "But we did not fully understand the part [X and Y] had played in the tragedy."
    "So far from fully," interrupted Clay, "that we began by arresting Rothmann."

--Murder of an M.P.! (In Search of a Villain), by Robert Gore-Browne

Read it and keep the secret of its ending!

Eight years ago I included Robert Gore-Browne's Murder of an M.P.!: A Study of Detection on a list of my favorite Golden Age detective novels.  The novel was highly praised in their Catalogue of Crime by Golden Age detective fiction authorities Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor, who quoted the second passage above ("so far from fully") as one of the "gems" of mystery literature.

With all the reprinting going on of late, I thought to myself, why not become an advocate here for this title?  Cause it's a damn good detective novel, as I see it.

Robert Gore-Browne's mystery, which was published in 1927 by Collins (as well as in the US, under the title In Search of a Villain and by Robert Gore-Brown, with no "e" on the end), introduces as amateur sleuth the arrogant and bibulous artist Lucien Clay, who appears not only here but in Death on Delivery, which was published in the US and UK two years later (in the US under the title By Way of Confession). The latter novel, unfortunately from my perspective, is more of a thriller.  Also appearing in both books is mild and phlegmatic Scotland Yard policeman Inspector Heppel, one of the more credible English coppers from the period.

The other key character in Murder of an M.P.! is Lucien Clay's "Watson" (or might I say his "Hastings"), a rather stolid London stockbroker by the name of Dale.  He and Clay first meet in the opening chapter of the novel on a nasty night in Soho at a thinly-populated Italian restaurant.  The conservative Dale at first dismisses Clay as a "dissolute Bohemian," but he soon realizes that the huge, red-bearded artist has a keen eye not only for painting subjects but for murder suspects. 

Clay, who boasts that the "Clays are the oldest family in Kent," is given to airy dismissals of tradesmen and middle class morality and he makes the occasional "humorous" remark about Jews that was then fashionable in the pages of other Golden Age mysteries, including those from novels by greats like Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie and Anthony Berkeley.  I find him an outsize, though perfectly believable, character from his time.  He makes a memorable, if not always likable, Great Detective figure.

At the restaurant Dale and Clay get into a discussion about the police and Clay proves exceedingly dismissive of the mental capacities boys in blue, including even his friend Inspector Heppel, who is also at the restaurant.  Heppel has tailed there a murder suspect, a pale unshaven Russian-born Jew named Max Rothmann, who had been arrested for inciting violence during the General Strike of 1926, which set many in the middle class against left-wing "radicals." Dale distastefully compares Rothmann in physical appearance to a suet pudding, "if a suet pudding can be imagined that needs a shave before dinner."

Clay insists that policeman, being of middle class origin, cannot understand murder cases that are out of the common rut.  The "perfect sleuth must be well bred," he airily pronounces (like himself).

Clay tells Heppel and Dale that Rothmann cannot possibly be guilty, from a psychological standpoint, of the crime of which he is accused: the dastardly murder, in the locked library of his country house, Lincot, of Sir Arthur Baxter, a conservative member of parliament known for his leadership of "the movement 'to turn out the Reds.'" 

Shortly before midnight on the night of the murder, the Lincot butler, Freeman, discovered Sir Arthur dead in his library.  He had been fatally stabbed in the back with a bayonet--a Russian bayonet from the Battle of Balaclava--that had been mounted on the wall.

from one field of death to another

Rothmann was known to have been admitted to see Sir Arthur Baxter in his library shortly before Sir Arthur's death (an odd circumstance in itself).  The radical leftist left by the French window to the terrace, leaving the doors to the library locked.  The terrace flower and gravel beds show that on the evening of the murder no one entered the house by means of the French window, and the other windows and doors to the house were locked in the evening.  So if it wasn't Rothmann who killed Sir Arthur, as Lucien Clay declares ("Trust a bobby to down on a Dago," he sneers), the killer seemingly had to have been someone who came from inside the house itself.  These individuals are, aside from the minor servants (who alibi each other):

*Sir Arthur's nephew, John ("I refused to believe that a young fellow of one's own class, outlook, and upbringing, could murder an old, unarmed man who was his near relation and who had shown him every kindness," declares Dale loyally.)
*His cousin and unpaid housekeeper, Sophie de Manca (Young Sophie Baxter married a purportedly wealthy Portuguese count, who died in the African colonies, pronounces Clay, of "gin aggravated by malaria" and left his widow only worthless shares in a gold mine, throwing her on her cousin's benevolence.)
*His lovely young typist and adopted daughter, Delia Eyre ("Typed his speeches about the Red Peril and the Hand of Moscow," explains Heppel.)
*His plump and platitudinous private secretary, Lewis Hope
*His butler, Freeman (He insists "on putting out a clean collar...every day," complains Clay.  "Face like a cod.")  But then butler never really do it--do they?

Then there's the mysterious American who was hanging around Lincot (you knew there would be one), who claims to to be a newspaperman, but is he really?

This has all the ingredients, masterfully blended, of classic English mystery from the High Golden Age: country houses, a floor plan. a knight, a butler, a body in a library, a pretty girl, scheming adventuresses, unwashed Russian Communists, quirky Americans, General Strike references, gratuitous potshots at any non-English nationality/ethnicity (tongue-in-cheek, I think), a brilliant and condescending amateur sleuth, his idiot friend (Dale really is like Christie's Hastings), a murder weapon taken from a trophy wall and an audacious but fairly clued murder.  And the writing is rather bright and witty for the period.  Maybe I'm asking for trouble with this pronouncement, but I can't imagine any fan of classic English crime not liking this one (if you can get past occasional indelicate comments from some characters).

So who was the author, Robert Gore-Browne?  More coming on him in the next post!

A Lady Croftster: Death of an Old Girl (1967), by Elizabeth Lemarchand

Elizabeth Wharton Lemarchand, daughter of Anthony Wharton Lemarchand and his wife Ethel Agnes Clark, was born on October 27, 1906 in Barnstaple, Devon.  She passed away, at the age of 93, in Exmouth, Devon in 2000 and was buried at Topsham Cemetery, Exeter.  Coming late to writing crime fiction, she published her first detective novel at the age of 60 in 1967.  This novel, Death of an Old Girl, became, however, the first of seventeen detective novels by her hand, the last of which, The Glade Manor Murder, was published in 1988, when she was 81.  With the deaths in the 1980s of Ngaio Marsh, Gladys Mitchell, Christianna Brand and Josephine Bell, Lemarchand at this time was probably the oldest living writer of classic British detection.  (Elizabeth Ferrars, who was still publishing at her death in 1995, was ten months younger than Lemarchand.)

Lemarchand was part of the "second wave" of Silver Age of Detective Fiction women mystery writers who began publishing crime fiction, for the most part, in the Sixties, when Golden Age Crime Queens Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham seemed still to be going strong.  Besides Lemarchand, there were:

Gravestone of Michael Joseph Lemarchand
and Sarah Sophia Wharton, Instow, Devon
great-grandparents of Elizabeth Lemarchand

Patricia Moyes (1923-2000), who debuted with Dead Men Don't Ski in 1959
Ellis Peters (1911-1995), who actually had been publishing mysteries, along with mainstream novels, for years, but achieved a new height in the 1960s, with her second "Felse Family" detective novel, Death and the Joyful Woman (1961), which won the Edgar Award for best crime novel.
PD James (1920-2014), who debuted with Cover Her Face in 1962
Ruth Rendell (1930-2015), who debuted with From Doon with Death in 1964
Catherine Aird (1930), who debuted with The Religious Body in 1966
Margaret Yorke (1924-2012), who debuted (as a series mystery writer) with Dead in the Morning in 1970. 

Margaret Yorke soon abandoned true detective fiction for crime novels of suspense, but James and Rendell by the 1980s would become known as England's reigning Crime Queens--and, much to their disdain, as the new Agatha Christies.  (Could there be more than one?) 

In truth, Moyes and Aird probably were closer fits to Agatha Christie, at least as the writing careers of James and Rendell evolved into "character" crime fiction; but Moyes and Aird, lighter writers, never attained the renown (and sales) of James and Rendell, despite esteemed American crime fiction critic Anthony Boucher's boosting of Moyes, in particular, in the US.  (Heretically, Boucher much preferred Moyes to PD James.)

Elizabeth Lemarchand tilted more to the Moyes-Aird side of things, her seventeen murder mysteries being focused firmly on the elucidation of problems rather than the agonies of the characters.  But if Moyes and Aird were most like Christie, Lemarchand was more like that other great criem writer who appeared in 1920, Freeman Wills Crofts, whose once famous detective Lemarchand has her series character Detective-Sergeant Gregory Toye actually reference in Death of an Old Girl.

I first read Death of an Old Girl back in the 1990s, when in used bookstores you could find Lemarchand's books--some of them, anyway, the ones that were reprinted in those often rather ugly paperback editions by Walker, the American mainstay publisher of second-tier British mystery in the 1970s and 1980s.  But it was only on rereading the novel more recently that I was struck by the terrific resemblance in her work to Freeman Wills Crofts, a big name from the Golden Age and one of the authors I write about in Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery. 

A religiously devout railway engineer, Freeman Crofts focused intensively on the murder problems in his mysteries, most of which were solved by his stouthearted Everyman policeman detective, Inspector Joseph French.  Crofts was considered a poor hand at characterization, but in his heyday between the wars he was very popular indeed in both the UK and US, as well as other countries, with fans of pure puzzle mysteries, who then were rather considerable in number.  I will discuss these similarities below, but, first, I have some more about the life of the author.

You may have noticed above that Lemarchand was considerably older than her Silver Age Crime Queen compatriots, being essentially a generation removed from them (Ellis Peters excepted).  Alone among these women (Peters again excepted), Lemarchand was born before the First World War, and, indeed, she would have remembered the war well, being 12 years old when it ended.  (As we will see, she very much had personal reason to remember it.) 

She was 14 when Crofts seminal detective novel The Cask was published, in 1920, the year of PD James' birth.  She was actually a month older than John Dickson Carr, one of the greatest names from the Golden Age, and only two years younger than another, Margery Allingham, who passed away a year before Death of an Old Girl was published.  When it came to classic detective fiction, Lemarchand was herself something of an "old girl," doubtlessly a classic detective fiction fan of long standing.

                                                                    *******

Lemarchand family crest

As we saw in my last blog post, Lemarchand's father was a very busy doctor in Barnstaple, quite familiar there with death, both natural and unnatural.  His wife, Ethel Agnes Clark, was the daughter of Octavus Deacon Clark, a prominent civil engineer who did much work in India under the British Raj.  Both husband and wife had been born in British colonies, Ethel in Narsinghpur, India and Arthur in Colombo, Ceylon.

Arthur was of Anglo-Dutch descent.  His great-grandfather Joseph Jeremiah Lemarchand, was born in 1760 in Utrecht in the Dutch Republic.  He emigrated to the Dutch colony Demerara (now part of Guyana), where he married Rebecca Alleyne (presumably no relation to Edward Alleyn, the inspiration for Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn).  However, he was living in Cecil Street in The Strand, London, when he died in 1812.

His son, Michael Joseph Lemarchand, who was born in Demerara in 1792, at St. Anne's Church, Soho married Sara Sophia Wharton a year after his father's death.  By 1819 the couple had moved to Ghazipur, in Bengal, India, where Michael became an indigo planter.  Francis Wharton Lemarchand, the couple's ninth of eleven children, was born there in 1828.  Michael Lemarchand did very well out in India and was granted a family crest, which included a bee (symbol of industry), ship and motto, Perseverando.  The family followed the motto.

In 1858 Francis Wharton Lemarchand at St. Peter's Church, Colombo married Alice Capel Higgs, who died from childbirth after less than a year of marriage.  (Their one son from the marriage would die in Tehran, Persia forty years later, under what circumstances I don't know.) Two years later Francis wed Clara Maria Bradstock, daughter of a minister, at Instow, Devon, where his parents had retired and were buried.  Francis, an investment banker, died in 1893 and was buried, like his parents, at Instow.

Besides Elizabeth Lemarchand's father, Arthur, Francis and Clara from their holy union produced seven children, including Frederick, an Oxford-educated schoolmaster (at Oxford he was a champion hammer thrower three years running), and Hugh, who served as a District Commissioner in southern Nigeria. The most remarkable thing about the Lemarchands, however, is that Arthur converted to Catholicism.  When he died in 1923 (when his daughter Elizabeth, was only 16), the family had moved a few miles from Barnstaple to Instow, but he was buried back in the Roman Catholic section of Barnstaple Cemetery.  More typically, Arthur and Francis as boys both attended public school at Malvern College, where both of them played cricket.  (I don't know whether Francis did any hammer throwing there.)

In Death of an Old Girl, the murder weapon, a stone paperweight "with veins of quartz or something, which made a pattern like the Sphinx," was brought by one of the schoolgirls back from Westward, Ho!, a seaside resort village located just a few miles from Instow that was founded a decade after the publication of Charles Kingsley's bestselling 1855 novel of the same name.  No doubt Elizabeth Lemarchand spent time there herself.

Elizabeth Lemarchand's eldest sibling and only brother,
Francis, who died in the influenza pandemic of 1918-20
http://www.stanwardine.com/cgi-bin/malvernww1.pl?id=249

In addition to Elizabeth, or Betty as she was known, Arthur and Ethel had three children: a son, Francis Wharton, and two daughters, Margery and Constance Mary.  Latecomer Betty was the baby of the family, her elder siblings having been born between 1893 and 1898.  Constance, who died in in 1995 at the age of 97, became a headmistress, while Francis joined the navy, serving during the Great War as a Surgeon Lieutenant.  During the war he participated in major naval actions off the Belgian coast (returning to the onetime domains of his ancestors).

In March 1918 the dapper and handsome naval officer wed an 18-year-old bride, but less than a year later he expired at the age of 25 from pneumonia, contracted during the influenza pandemic of 1918-20--an event which surely must have constituted a devastating tragedy for his family.  His father Arthur passed away four years later, at the age of 56, though his mother Ethel, enjoying the longevity of the Lemarchand ladies, died in 1961, at the age of 94.

3 Elm Terrace Instow, where the Lemarchands lived during and after the Great War
3 is the third bow window from the left

view of the estuary from Elm Terrace

In the last year of the war, when she was in her 12th year, young Betty enrolled at the Ursuline Convent at nearby Bideford, which she attended for eight years, until 1926.  In 1927 she received a BA with Honors from the University of Exeter, followed by an MA in 1929.  The same year in Geneva, Switzerland she attended the Graduate Institute of International Studies, which at the time was closely associated with the League of Nations.

In the 1930s Betty, now Elizabeth, Lemarchand served in suburban Bristol as an assistant mistress at Clifton High School for Girls, where bestselling lesbian author Mary Renault had been a student in the 1920s, and at Sutton High School for Girls in London.  (Clifton was also home to the Albert Villa School, conducted by relatives of Rickie Webb of Patrick Quentin fame.)  In 1940 she joined the staff at The Godolphin School at Salisbury.  Becoming Deputy Headmistress in 1943, she would serve in this position until 1960.  Notable graduates of the school in the mystery field, before and after Lemarchand's time there, were Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Bell and Minette Walters.

During her last year at The Godolphin School, Lemarchand was Acting Headmistress, and for a single year she was Headmistress at Lowther College for girls in Wales, before retiring from teaching in 1961.  With Gertude Mary Jerred, who had been Headmistress at The Godolphin School during most of Lemarchand's tenure there, she bought a cottage in Dartmoor, and there the two women resided together for most of the rest of their lives. (Jerred died at the age of 96 in 1998, two years before Lemarchand.)

Multi-faceted author Antonia Fraser (who also managed to compose a few mysteries) recalled that, when her Catholic parents transferred her from Goldolphin to St. Mary's, a Catholic school, in 1946, when she was 14, Elizabeth Lemarchand, "on hearing of my future fate, had pressed a novel into my hands, Frost in May by Antonia White which had been published in the early Thirties, in order, as she put it, to warn me.  As a warning it had exactly the opposite effect.  I was tremendously excited.  The plot concerned a Protestant girl...who, like me, was sent to a Catholic school...."

Kate Macdonald's review of Frost in May may, judging from Antonia Fraser's comments above, summarize Elizabeth Lemarchand's view of Catholic education, based on her own experience (she attended Catholic school the same time Antonia White did):

It's a novel about power over innocents, within a Catholic context....the nuns are (mostly) passionately abusive, expressing always their love and care and exalted hope for the girls under their control, as the punish, humiliate, bully, terrify and dominate them.  

Interestingly, in Death of an Old Girl Lemarchand is critical of traditionalists, who, like the titular "old girl," oppose liberalizing the school environment and relaxing both physical and mental restraints on the girls.

Ursuline Convent, Bideford, early 20th century

                                                                     *******

Look at that chap Inspector French [thought Sergeant Toye].  First thing he always did in the tales was to make up his mind to come back to the scene of the crime for his next holiday.  Personally, he didn't feel all that stuck on Upshire.  A bit tame....Now a case in Devon or Cornwall at some nice place on the coast would suit him down to the ground.

--Death of an Old Girl (1967)

After her retirement in 1961, Lemarchand began publishing short stories; and her detective novel Death of an Old Girl appeared, as mentioned above, in 1967.  It was not published in the US at the time, though it did appear there in the 1980s, after Lemarchand had been taken up by the publisher Walker, who published a great many of what might be termed second and third tier British mystery writers, of the more traditional sort.  (They also published, among others, Marian Babson, Emma Page, Josephine Bell, W. J. Burley and George Bellairs.)

Highly praised by puzzle purists Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor in a Catalogue of Crime and only recently reprinted after being out-of-print for thirty years, Death of an Old Girl employs a well-rendered girls' school setting that certainly would have been familiar to the author.  It is a highly traditional concoction that, in spite of occasional period references to androgynous young people, could just as easily have appeared in the 1930s.

Godolphin School, early 20th century

The "old girl" of the title is meddlesome Beatrice Baynes, a hidebound traditionalist alumnus of Meldon School for girls (she was there around the turn of the century), who reflexively opposes all of the innovations of new headmistress Helen Renshaw.  BB lives in an ancestral country house located conveniently adjacent to Meldon School.  The school itself is of that ultra-rational Georgian style so beloved by Golden Age detective novelists, "with its mellow rose-red brickwork, beautifully proportioned windows and fine portico"--the only word we're missing here is elegant, PD James' favorite word...well, either that, or atavistic.

At a school reunion BB makes rather an ass of herself, denouncing the artwork fostered by new art teacher Ann Cartmell, a protege of London art bigwig Clive Torrance, on whom Ann has rather a pash.  Aside from offending people at Meldon, BB's other favorite pastime is lording it over her dependents, great-nephew George Baynes, who could be a feckless man-about-town from a 1920s English detective novel, and sad sackette Madge Thornton, music teacher at Meldon and BB's godchild.  When BB is found dead from a bop on the head in Ann's classroom, her body stuffed under a puppet theater, all of the above people become suspects in the police investigation conducted by Scotland Yard's Inspector Bill Pollard and Sergeant Gregory Toye.

For lovers of traditional English mystery, this is as traditional gets--indeed, rather astonishingly so for 1967, a year after the ultimate bulwark of British detection tradition, Agatha Christie, gave us the ever-so-groovy Third Girl and a year before Ngaio Marsh decided to tackle race relations in Clutch of Constables.

There's not one but two timetables, a family tree, a "rough sketch" of the school grounds, police constables on bicycles, fine brandy as a murder case medicinal, a reference to "our old friend the blunt instrument," a local police inspector named Beakbane, Sergeant Toye pulling out an ordinance survey, multiple people referring to money as "lolly," a hoity-toity suspect surprised and impressed when a policeman actually addresses him in "public school English," a dour groundsman named Jock who utters heavy sarcasm to the schoolgirls in equally heavy Scottish dialect  ("I saw ye baith the nicht in yon carr parrkt b' the gates.  Wi' yer brithers, nae doot."), a working class character who says "stummick" for stomach and vigorously denounces the "bloody Japs," and a housekeeper, Mrs. Hinks, who soon reaches the "stage of pleasurable self-importance" as a witness in a murder case.  Murder will make people uppish.

Inspector Pollard reminded me  a lot of Crofts' Inspector French, or "Soapy Joe" as he was known, on account of his calculated soft soap interviewing techniques

"Contrary to popular belief the police aren't out for an arrest at any price, you know, Miss Renshaw," explains Pollard.  "A wrong one in this case could easily put paid to my own chance of promotion."  (To his relief, this technique was successful.) 

I also liked when Pollard took time solicitously to ask a suspect, "Have you had any tea?" and uttered apparently his strongest oath, "my foot."  I don't know whether such policemen ever really existed, but it sure beats the cops in pre Warren Court American mysteries, who are always tiresomely threatening people with the "third degree" and the like.

There's another very French moment when Pollard indulges himself in rosy anticipation of brilliantly solving the case, only for it to be "suddenly extinguished by a cold shower of realism."  This is a highly Croftisan passage, the elder author having obviously enjoyed chronicling his Everyman detectives mental ups and downs during his investigations in a sort of "Pilgrim's Progress" fashion.

Unfortunately about a fifth of the way though the novel a key clue went clunk and at that point I was sure I knew whodunit and why.  It doesn't help that the author seems to go out of her way with her narration to exonerate three of the major suspects for the reader.  By the tenth of the novel's 21 chapters I had absolutely no doubt who the killer was, and when I turned at that point to the last pages I saw I was exactly right.  This left little of interest in the book for me, as the crime mechanics themselves were not particularly fascinating.  So while this book was a lot like Crofts (with better characterization), it regrettably was, in my view, second or third rank Crofts. 

However, I can promise you that Lemarchand went on to write some better books.  And if you miss the clue that goes clunk, you may be more favorably impressed with the novel than I was.  Though if you do miss it, shame on you! (Just kidding.)

On the new edition, issued by Sapere, there's attractive modern cover art, although it's rather misleading as you don't see an elegant school or country house on the cover but rather a decrepit country cottage.  This and the description might make you think it's a gritty village mystery, which it absolutely is not.  Also the map was not to be found in my Kindle edition.  However, the price was very good indeed! 

I think it's exciting news for fans of traditional British mystery that Lemarchand's novels are being brought back into print, and you should expect to hear more from me about them in the future.