Death in the Round Read online

  Anne Morice

  Death in the Round

  ‘So what tips do you need of a criminal nature?’

  ‘Oh, nothing complicated. Just the basic rules for committing the perfect murder will do to be going on with.’

  The Rotunda in Dearehaven has a reputation as one of the most distinguished theatres in the country. Its success is due to its owner, Elfrieda Henshaw, a strong-willed woman whose character and methods have moulded a professional and happy company.

  Tessa Crichton joins the cast of the new play, only to find the company has been upset by Elfrieda’s protégée. Melanie, a young woman with a wayward past who has bewitched the old lady.

  As rehearsals get under way, Melanie disappears and everyone except Elfrieda is convinced she has absconded with the theatre’s cash. Elfrieda is found dead, in puzzling circumstances which sharpen Tessa’s acute antennae for the mysterious. It is then discovered that the famous Rotunda is nearly bankrupt – and the small residue of the once great fortune is bequeathed to Melanie.

  In splendid form Tessa ferrets her way to the truth in a most satisfying dénouement.

  Death in the Round was originally published in 1980. This new edition features an introduction and afterword by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  ‘Actress Tessa Crichton is just the girl to have in the wings when disappearance and death take the stage at a seaside rep. On cue.’ Evening News

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Contents

  Introduction by Curtis Evans

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Titles by Anne Morice

  Copyright

  Introduction

  By 1970 the Golden Age of detective fiction, which had dawned in splendor a half-century earlier in 1920, seemingly had sunk into shadow like the sun at eventide. There were still a few old bodies from those early, glittering days who practiced the fine art of finely clued murder, to be sure, but in most cases the hands of those murderously talented individuals were growing increasingly infirm. Queen of Crime Agatha Christie, now eighty years old, retained her bestselling status around the world, but surely no one could have deluded herself into thinking that the novel Passenger to Frankfurt, the author’s 1970 “Christie for Christmas” (which publishers for want of a better word dubbed “an Extravaganza”) was prime Christie—or, indeed, anything remotely close to it. Similarly, two other old crime masters, Americans John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen (comparative striplings in their sixties), both published detective novels that year, but both books were notably weak efforts on their parts. Agatha Christie’s American counterpart in terms of work productivity and worldwide sales, Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, published nothing at all that year, having passed away in March at the age of eighty. Admittedly such old-timers as Rex Stout, Ngaio Marsh, Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell were still playing the game with some of their old élan, but in truth their glory days had fallen behind them as well. Others, like Margery Allingham and John Street, had died within the last few years or, like Anthony Gilbert, Nicholas Blake, Leo Bruce and Christopher Bush, soon would expire or become debilitated. Decidedly in 1970—a year which saw the trials of the Manson family and the Chicago Seven, assorted bombings, kidnappings and plane hijackings by such terroristic entities as the Weathermen, the Red Army, the PLO and the FLQ, the American invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State shootings and the drug overdose deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin—leisure readers now more than ever stood in need of the intelligent escapism which classic crime fiction provided. Yet the old order in crime fiction, like that in world politics and society, seemed irrevocably to be washing away in a bloody tide of violent anarchy and all round uncouthness.

  Or was it? Old values have a way of persisting. Even as the generation which produced the glorious detective fiction of the Golden Age finally began exiting the crime scene, a new generation of younger puzzle adepts had arisen, not to take the esteemed places of their elders, but to contribute their own worthy efforts to the rarefied field of fair play murder. Among these writers were P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Emma Lathen, Patricia Moyes, H.R.F. Keating, Catherine Aird, Joyce Porter, Margaret Yorke, Elizabeth Lemarchand, Reginald Hill, Peter Lovesey and the author whom you are perusing now, Anne Morice (1916-1989). Morice, who like Yorke, Lovesey and Hill debuted as a mystery writer in 1970, was lavishly welcomed by critics in the United Kingdom (she was not published in the United States until 1974) upon the publication of her first mystery, Death in the Grand Manor, which suggestively and anachronistically was subtitled not an “extravaganza,” but a novel of detection. Fittingly the book was lauded by no less than seemingly permanently retired Golden Age stalwarts Edmund Crispin and Francis Iles (aka Anthony Berkeley Cox). Crispin deemed Morice’s debut puzzler “a charming whodunit . . . full of unforced buoyance” and prescribed it as a “remedy for existentialist gloom,” while Iles, who would pass away at the age of seventy-seven less than six months after penning his review, found the novel a “most attractive lightweight,” adding enthusiastically: “[E]ntertainingly written, it provides a modern version of the classical type of detective story. I was much taken with the cheerful young narrator . . . and I think most readers will feel the same way. Warmly recommended.” Similarly, Maurice Richardson, who, although not a crime writer, had reviewed crime fiction for decades at the London Observer, lavished praise upon Morice’s maiden mystery: “Entrancingly fresh and lively whodunit . . . . Excellent dialogue . . . . Much superior to the average effort to lighten the detective story.”

  With such a critical sendoff, it is no surprise that Anne Morice’s crime fiction took flight on the wings of its bracing mirth. Over the next two decades twenty-five Anne Morice mysteries were published (the last of them posthumously), at the rate of one or two year. Twenty-three of these concerned the investigations of Tessa Crichton, a charming young actress who always manages to cross paths with murder, while two, written at the end of her career, detail cases of Detective Superintendent “Tubby” Wiseman. In 1976 Morice along with Margaret Yorke was chosen to become a member of Britain’s prestigious Detection Club, preceding Ruth Rendell by a year, while in the 1980s her books were included in Bantam’s superlative paperback “Murder Most British” series, which included luminaries from both present and past like Rendell, Yorke, Margery Allingham, Patricia Wentworth, Christianna Brand, Elizabeth Ferrars, Catherine Aird, Margaret Erskine, Marian Babson, Dorothy Simpson, June Thomson and last, but most certainly not least, the Queen of Crime herself, Agatha Christie. In 1974, when Morice’s fifth Tessa Crichton detective novel, Death of a Dutiful Daughter, was picked up in the United States, the author’s work again was received with acclaim, with reviewers emphasizing the author’s cozy traditionalism (though the term “cozy” had not then come into common use in reference to traditional English and American mysteries). In his notice of Morice’s Death of a Wedding Guest (1976), “Newgate Callendar” (aka classical music critic Harold C. Schoenberg), Seventie
s crime fiction reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, observed that “Morice is a traditionalist, and she has no surprises [in terms of subject matter] in her latest book. What she does have, as always, is a bright and amusing style . . . [and] a general air of sophisticated writing.” Perhaps a couple of reviews from Middle America—where intense Anglophilia, the dogmatic pronouncements of Raymond Chandler and Edmund Wilson notwithstanding, still ran rampant among mystery readers—best indicate the cozy criminal appeal of Anne Morice:

  Anne Morice . . . acquired me as a fan when I read her “Death and the Dutiful Daughter.” In this new novel, she did not disappoint me. The same appealing female detective, Tessa Crichton, solves the mysteries on her own, which is surprising in view of the fact that Tessa is actually not a detective, but a film actress. Tessa just seems to be at places where a murder occurs, and at the most unlikely places at that . . . this time at a garden fete on the estate of a millionaire tycoon . . . . The plot is well constructed; I must confess that I, like the police, had my suspect all picked out too. I was “dead” wrong (if you will excuse the expression) because my suspect was also murdered before not too many pages turned . . . . This is not a blood-curdling, chilling mystery; it is amusing and light, but Miss Morice writes in a polished and intelligent manner, providing pleasure and entertainment. (Rose Levine Isaacson, review of Death of a Heavenly Twin, Jackson Mississippi Clarion-Ledger, 18 August 1974)

  I like English mysteries because the victims are always rotten people who deserve to die. Anne Morice, like Ngaio Marsh et al., writes tongue in cheek but with great care. It is always a joy to read English at its glorious best. (Sally Edwards, “Ever-So British, This Tale,” review of Killing with Kindness, Charlotte North Carolina Observer, 10 April 1975)

  While it is true that Anne Morice’s mysteries most frequently take place at country villages and estates, surely the quintessence of modern cozy mystery settings, there is a pleasing tartness to Tessa’s narration and the brittle, epigrammatic dialogue which reminds me of the Golden Age Crime Queens (particularly Ngaio Marsh) and, to part from mystery for a moment, English playwright Noel Coward. Morice’s books may be cozy but they most certainly are not cloying, nor are the sentiments which the characters express invariably “traditional.” The author avoids any traces of soppiness or sentimentality and has a knack for clever turns of phrase which is characteristic of the bright young things of the Twenties and Thirties, the decades of her own youth. “Sackcloth and ashes would have been overdressing for the mood I had sunk into by then,” Tessa reflects at one point in the novel Death in the Grand Manor. Never fear, however: nothing, not even the odd murder or two, keeps Tessa down in the dumps for long; and invariably she finds herself back on the trail of murder most foul, to the consternation of her handsome, debonair husband, Inspector Robin Price of Scotland Yard (whom she meets in the first novel in the series and has married by the second), and the exasperation of her amusingly eccentric and indolent playwright cousin, Toby Crichton, both of whom feature in almost all of the Tessa Crichton novels. Murder may not lastingly mar Tessa’s equanimity, but she certainly takes her detection seriously.

  Three decades now having passed since Anne Morice’s crime novels were in print, fans of British mystery in both its classic and cozy forms should derive much pleasure in discovering (or rediscovering) her work in these new Dean Street Press editions and thereby passing time once again in that pleasant fictional English world where death affords us not emotional disturbance and distress but enjoyable and intelligent diversion.

  Curtis Evans

  ONE

  ‘Ever been to Dearehaven?’ I asked Robin during one of our leisurely Sunday breakfasts.

  Being a Detective Inspector of the C.I.D., he feels more at home asking such questions than answering them and did not commit himself.

  ‘It’s in Dorset, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right. Eighteen miles south-west of Dorchester. I got that from The Good Food Guide.’

  ‘Wouldn’t an atlas have served the purpose better?’

  ‘No, because if I’m going to do three months there in rep. one of the first things you and Toby will want to know is whether there’s a decent restaurant.’

  ‘Oh, so that’s what you’ll be doing, is it?’

  ‘I may. My agent is in favour of the idea.’

  ‘When would you go?’

  ‘20th May, starting with five weeks’ rehearsal, which is far from bad. Dearehaven is on the coast too, so that wouldn’t be bad either.’

  ‘What plays are they doing?’

  ‘Only one, so far as I’m concerned, and that’s the least bad part of all. It’s the new James Crowther. I haven’t read it yet, but my agent says it’s absolutely certain to come in. No guarantee that I’d come in with it, of course, but one has to take these gambles.’

  ‘I find I understand less about the theatre every day,’ Robin complained. ‘Why should a new play by James Crowther, which is a name that even I recognise, get its try-out at an obscure place like Dearehaven?’

  ‘Not all that obscure. In fact, it’s become quite celebrated during the past few years.’

  ‘But not on the regular pre-London circuit, surely?’

  ‘It is for Jamie Crowther. Practically all his plays get their first airing at Dearehaven. He lives there, for a start, which makes it all nice and cosy, but I think the main reason is that the old legend in her time, Elfrieda Henshaw, has got him in her pocket.’

  ‘Elfrieda Who?’

  ‘Henshaw. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of her famous Rotunda Theatre?’

  ‘Not a word. What’s so special about it?’

  ‘It makes a profit, for one thing, which is about as special as you can get. And all due, so they say, to the inexhaustible tenacity and dedication of Elfrieda. She’s in her mid-seventies now, but no sign of these fires burning low, I gather.’

  ‘Why did she choose Dearehaven to blaze in?’

  ‘She didn’t choose it, it was thrust upon her. She’s lived there all her life, the last of a long line of highly respectable, bloodsucking mill-owners or something. It was always mills that people of that sort owned, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Perhaps not in Dorset?’

  ‘No, you’re right; more likely breweries or cider. But the point is that they were the real old-fashioned, chapel-going, clogs-to-riches sort. Elfrieda was the only child and she never married. A very ugly duckling, by all accounts, and too clever for her own good. On the other hand, her father had such barrels of money that she must have had a few offers. I suppose the truth is that she never found a suitor who was willing to devote his whole life to the theatre.’

  ‘Oh, so this is not a new hobby?’

  ‘No, a lifelong passion, but naturally her parents vetoed any sort of career in that line, they even regarded it as somewhat depraved to be a member of the audience. The most she was allowed to do was to organise tableaux for charity, which is where she doubtless got bitten by the impresario bug, and she seems to have spent every spare moment reading everything connected with the theatre that she could lay her hands on.’

  Robin, whose attitude to the profession stops short of idolatry, remarked sadly:

  ‘What a terribly dreary life! Is she a bit cracked?’

  ‘As a coot, I should imagine; and pity there aren’t more like her. However, the story has a happy ending. The old man left her everything, right down to the last stick and stone and, by a lucky chance, some of them were in a broken-down old building on the seafront, known as the Rotunda.’

  ‘You mean to say the old hypocrite actually owned a theatre?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t one in his day. It housed what they grandly called the Maritime Museum, but it was pretty crummy, by all accounts and practically the only people who paid to go in were the board and lodging brigade, who had to find somewhere to get out of the rain. So eventually it was closed and left to rot. Then, just as it was about to be pulled down, to make way for a block of holiday flats, i
t fell into Elfrieda’s lap. She’s obviously a woman of vision and she immediately saw the possibilities of turning it into a theatre in the round, which was practically unknown in those days. Furthermore, she wanted all the most talented actors and directors to come and work there, which in no time at all is what they were doing.’

  ‘What was her secret?’

  ‘It has great prestige nowadays, of course, but I gather that to start with it was done by a mixture of bully and bribe.’

  ‘Oh, I see! So all this lovely money comes out of her own pocket? Nothing to do with audiences actually paying to get in?’

  ‘Oh yes, they do that too, but you can’t make a profit out of a provincial theatre of that size, even if you play to capacity at every performance. They all need subsidies of some kind and the rumour is that Elfrieda now gets more than she knows what to do with. Such is the present glory of the Rotunda that everyone, from the local ratepayers to the television companies, tumble over themselves to chip in.’

  ‘So you won’t be busking on Dearehaven pier to raise your fare back to London, even if the play flops?’

  ‘I don’t think there is a pier. It’s much too genteel for that sort of thing.’

  ‘Is there a decent restaurant, though?’

  ‘Oh, you bet. They list three, but the Green Man sounds the most promising. Near the harbour and owned and managed by Mr and Mrs Banks. Mister does the cooking and he’s noted for his specialities with lobster and crab. They have a few rooms too, so I might stay there when I go down next week for my interview.’

  ‘You mean you have to go slogging all the way to Dorset to be interviewed? I thought you’d left that rung of the ladder behind you?’

  ‘Yes, in theory, but Dearehaven is unique. I can’t see Elfrieda putting herself out to come to London just to suit my convenience; nor can I believe that anyone sets foot on the Rotunda stage without her personal approval. Besides, I’ll need to look around and get fixed up in advance with somewhere to live which is at least technically within my means. I shouldn’t imagine that a place which is renowned for its lobster and crab would be exactly cheap, would you?’