Murder Post-Dated Read online

  Anne Morice

  Murder Post-Dated

  “I should warn you that it is not a pretty story.”

  “Stories about murder rarely are.”

  Nobody knows who started the rumour that James McGrath murdered his wife Rosamund. Certainly no one had seen her in a while, and she had gone off to visit a sick cousin without mentioning a trip to the neighbours. Still, everyone was inclined to accept the story – that is, until one of the neighbours meets the cousin in town, in excellent health and eager for news of country cousin Rosamund. Tessa Crichton, a guest in the Oxfordshire locale, is fascinated by this series of events. Fascination soon turns to a neat bit of detection when someone comes to her with a very strange confession.

  Dipping into the case with relish, Tessa soon suspects there’s murder mixed up in the mystery. But until she comes up with a body – or two – no killer can get just deserts.

  Murder Post-Dated was originally published in 1983. This new edition features an introduction and afterword by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  ‘The fun lies in the style, light and sweet as a soufflé.” Daily Telegraph

  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

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  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), Seventies 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

  I

  The card told us only that Mrs. Carrington would be At Home for Emily at 9 p.m. on Saturday, 25th May, when there would be supper and dancing and that we should address our reply to Sowerley Grange, near Storhampton, Oxfordshire. But Elsa had written half a dozen lines on the back, which I read aloud to Robin:

  “Just wanted to assure you that you won’t be letting yourselves in for any unpleasantness this time. The murder has already taken place and I am happy to say that it turned out not to be a murder, after all. So do hope you’ll both be able to come.”

  This struck me as a novel variation and I asked Robin, who, as well as being my husband, is a Chief Inspector in the C.I.D., whether he had come across anything of the kind in his experience.

  “All the time,” he replied.

  “Oh, really? So, after all, how little I know about crime!”

  “I am talking of events which were either not criminal, or, if they were, never got into the records.”

  “Such as?”

  “There are two examples which spring to mind. One is where a death occurs and some spiteful person puts it around that it was murder or manslaughter, usually naming the deceased’s marriage partner as the culprit. This sometimes gets to the point where an investigation has to be set up, occasionally a post mortem as well, all of which invariably proves beyond doubt that death was due to natural causes.”

  “And the other kind?”

  “Oh, that’s when a murder probably was intended, but was so inexpertly carried out that the victim survived. So no charges are brought.”

  “And, in cases of that sort, does the would-be murderer usually have another shot?”

  “Yes, quite often. By the way, why is Elsa giving a party for Millie?”

  “It’s her birthday.”

  “But it sounds like the kind of formal dinner-dance affair which Millie wouldn’t be seen dead at. I was under the impression that her idea of a rollicking party was to gloom around on the floor, listening to records and drinking Coke?”

  “Well, no doubt, this one was Elsa’s idea, although it doesn’t sound quite in her line either. On the other hand, perhaps Millie is becoming conventional in her old age. She’ll be eighteen, after all. Shall I accept?”

  “Why not? I’m sure you want to go and Elsa will understand if circumstances beyond my control oblige me to drop out at the last minute.”

  “But I don’t fancy driving back to London on my own at three o’clock in the morning and I can’t very well ask her to put me up for the night. She’ll have dozens of Millie’s friends camping out all over the house, as it is.”

  “Then you could stay at Roakes with Toby. It’s only eight miles away, so you should be able to manage it, providing you go easy on the champagne.”

  “Not a bad idea, Robin. I’ll ring him up right away and make provisional reservations for us both. In fact, if you’ve no objection, I might extend my own booking by an extra day or two. That’s the week we start shooting the Oxford scenes, all straw boaters and lacy parasols. They’ve booked me into an hotel, but it would be much more fun to stay with Toby and get them to lay on a car and driver instead. I really would like to go to Millie’s party and I’m also keen to find out which type of non-murder Elsa was talking about. If it’s the second, it seems to me that, whatever she may say, there could well be more unpleasantness to come.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. From what I know of the people of Sowerley, this will turn out to be a much more complicated affair than either of my two run-of-the-mill offerings.”

  TWO

  There were over a hundred guests, most of them in their late teens. The rest fell into two categories, one consisting of friends of Elsa’s son, Marcus Carrington, who was several years older than his sister, the other of her own contemporaries, who had been roped in to provide moral support, the last group being seated round three sides of a refectory table on a dais at one end of the marquee.

  This arrangement, like the invitation card, was in sharp contrast to Elsa’s normally casual brand of hospitality, but I was unable to ask her whether it was for Millie’s benefit, or whether she had been taking a course in social climbing. By the time I arrived she was tearing around in a frenzy, issuing commands and countermands to the hired staff and evidently on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Small wonder either, for, as Marcus confided in a muttered aside, the torrential rain which had fallen during the morning had not only brought down one section of the marquee, wrecking the most spectacular flower piece of all, but had also transformed the meadow which was doing duty as a car park into a slimy bog.r />
  In addition to this, it had now turned out that the hem of Millie’s dress, which measured approximately four miles, had to be turned up before she would consent to wear it, and some of the more raffish guests had started rolling up at five o’clock, apparently under the impression that their arrival was the signal for the party to begin.

  Strictly speaking, I did not qualify for any of the three age groups, but Elsa tactfully explained that, since Robin and I were both strong on moral support, she had placed us with the senior citizens and I was now stuck with them, even though circumstances beyond his control had forced him to drop out at the last minute. One who, owing to circumstances beyond Elsa’s control, had dropped in at the last minute was the man on my left, whose name, as I was able to ascertain by a discreet lean sideways, was James Megrar. He appeared to be about forty, large in personality, as well as girth and height, bursting with energy and with a fast and voluble way of speaking, as though there could never be enough time to say everything that needed to be said.

  I could not use the opening gambit of asking him how he pronounced his unusual surname because, although having either not heard or instantly forgotten it, we had in fact been formally introduced during the run-up to dinner. However, it at once became evident that no gambits, opening or otherwise, were needed to get this one going and within five minutes I had learnt that until recently he had been a partner in a firm of landscape gardeners in Sussex, but had now set up on his own, with offices in Dedley, and that his principal pleasures in life were fishing and bird watching.

  Nor were his interests by any means confined to these activities and, having established that I was indeed Theresa Crichton, the actress, he began firing questions at me about the economics of the theatre, most of which proved him to be better informed on the subject than I was myself. Nevertheless, he listened attentively to the answers, which is always flattering, and then responded with more questions, interlarded with anecdotes, which were not only funny, but, in two cases, new to me.