After four installments with thrillerish elements, the Miss Silver series really came into its own as a true detective series in 1943 with The Chinese Shawl. Just as the author would give English mystery fans some paradigmatic village mysteries in the 1940s and 1950s, in 1943 with The Chinese Shawl she gave her readers a classic country house party mystery, just as the mystery subgenre's heyday was passing during the Second World War. England would never be the same after the war and neither would classic mystery, though both would find a way to survive austerity--austerity both of means and of murderous invention.
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| it was such a lovely thing-- black ground and deep black fringe, every inch of the ground worked over in a pattern of fantastic loveliness and all the colors of a fairy tale |
Unlike a lot of other mysteries from the time, The Chinese Shawl frankly acknowledges the war; indeed, the war permeates the book from the first page, when mention is made of German air raids. The protagonist of the novel is twenty-one year old Laura Fane, a lovely, sweet-natured, orphan gel who has just come into control of her inheritance, which consists of an income of L400 a year (about 24,000 pounds today or 31,000 dollars).
Three-fourths of this amount comes from the rental of the country estate The Priory to her first cousin, once removed, Agnes Fane, who lives there with her first cousin Lucy Adams (also a first cousin, once removed to Laura). Both women are spinsters of a certain age, imposing Agnes being stated to be 57 or 58 and dumpy Lucy presumably thereabout.
Laura lives in the country with an aunt and does war work as a secretary at a home for convalescing soldiers and she also has plenty to do around the house, what with her aunt only having one maid these days. (Drat the war!)
At The Priory Agnes and Lucy raised another, much younger orphaned cousin: Tanis Lyle, who if this were a contemporary book by Anglo-American hard-boiled author Raymond Chandler would unquestionably be the femme fatale and likely murderer of the tale. Instead, she's our murderee. Well, what else can you do when you have an exotic name like that, other than engage in femme fatalery?
A stage actress in her late twenties, Tanis has already been married (and divorced) and she has a young child, who is being raised away somewhere, in Scotland I think, by its grandmother. (They did call young children "its" in those days.) She now specializes in flirting with other girls' boyfriends, taking and then casually discarding them. She is not exactly beautiful but knows how to present herself. She has ambitions of "going Hollywood." All in all, it's a classic good girl-bad girl contrast between the virginal, naturally blooming English rose Laura and the hothouse, forced Tanis, who presumably has been not just around the block but a multitude of surrounding neighborhoods, if not entire towns.
Laura is in London to meet her lawyer and when she does she discovers from him that Agnes wants to buy The Priory outright from her, for 12,000 pounds (over 700,000 today, or not too far off one million American dollars). Agnes through Tanis invites Laura to a house party at The Priory, which she has never actually ever seen due to a family feud. You see, over two decades ago her father, Oliver Fane, was supposed to marry his cousin Agnes but he backed out of the engagement when he fell in love with another woman, Laura's future mother. Intensely passionate Agnes responded, naturally enough, by taking her favorite horse out for a ride and driving the poor beast so hard that they both ended up in the local quarry, where the horse was killed and Agnes crippled for life. (Don't worry: she gets around expertly in a wheelchair.)
This is quite a bit of backstory. You see, we are in the world of the spacious detective novel of manners, which takes its time to background characters and lavishes attention on dialogue. Laura doesn't even make it to The Priory until page fifty, a-fifth of the way into the novel, and Tanis stays alive and kicking and femme fataleing until page 108, nearly halfway into the book. There's even another house party that takes place in London before the murder house party, where we first meet many of the characters, most of whom will become suspects in Tanis' slaying.
There's intensly handsome RAF pilot Carey Desborough, recovering from a crash, whom Tanis' cousins (or aunts, Tanis calls them, on account of their being so much older) Agnes and Lucinda think is engaged to Tanis, though in fact Tanis has already thrown him over. Carey of course falls in love at second sight with Laura. Then there are two airmen on leave, brothers Robin and Alistair Maxwell. The latter is one of Tanis' current victims (she's got several on a string, including her ex-husband), much to the frustration of kittenish young Petra North, who loves Alistair. (Tanis and Petra--seems Agatha Christie wasn't the only Golden Age mystery writer interested in the middle east.)
I'm not even mentioning Miss Sophy Ferrers, a relation with whom Laura is staying in London who is like a character out of a Jane Austen novel. But she disappears from the book after the scene shifts to The Priory. Happily, Miss Silver, armed with her knitting bag and myriad Victorian maxims, is there, however, having been hired by Agnes to investigate some thefts at The Priory. (Could it be their evacuees?)
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| a cubist rendering of a triangle |
I'm trying to pin down Miss Silver's age and here we find the retired governess turned sleuth was formerly a schoolmate of Lucinda, who presumably is around her cousin Agnes' age or a bit older. The author herself was 65 when she wrote The Chinese Shawl. She was born in 1877 and married a man old enough to be her father a couple of weeks after the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, when she was 23.
I think it's safe to assume that Miss Silver is around the age of the author. People find her anachronistic in Fifties mystery, but after all there were then people, like the author, who had grown up under the reign of the first and last Empress of India and were young governesses when her son Edward ruled.
Miss Silver was in fact the governess of Randal Marsh, now Superintendent of fictional Ledshire, where The Priory is located. He was introduced two years earlier in the more thrillerish Miss Silver mystery Danger Point, which in the current one we are told took place in Autumn 1939. We also are told that Miss Silver actually saved Randal's life in the much alluded to case of the poisoned caterpillars, which presumably took place in the spring of '39, not to long after the events detailed in Lonesome Road. Someone needs to do a pastiche of this lost case!
Conversation between these Randal and his former governess is affectionate but very proper and genteel, with much exclaiming of "My dear Randal!" and "My dear Miss Silver!" Perhaps a bit precious but the author herself has plenty of experiences of governesses and nannies and no doubt knew her stuff.
The murder investigation works its way to a dramatic--and dramatically satisfying--conclusion, and all in all I would say this is one of the best Miss Silver detective novels, pleasingly redolent with wartime atmosphere. I see I haven't mentioned Laura's beautiful Chinese shawl, a gift from her father to her mother. Don't worry: it's mentioned a lot in the book and it does play a part in the tale.
Oh, yes, by my count Miss Silver coughs 22 times. That cough will get more pronounced.
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