Hollow Vengeance Read online

  Anne Morice

  Hollow Vengeance

  Some fast thinking would be required, if I were not to get my head chopped off on the coming Friday.

  When Mrs Trelawney, a much-married Australian of considerable fortune, bought the big house at Sowerley, the locals hoped her money would help enrich the locality and the community. Instead they found themselves in a cold war.

  When Tessa Crichton arrives in the neighbourhood to stay with some old friends, there is a tense atmosphere as the established inhabitants mount guard over the oak tree threatened by the Trelawney axe. But almost before Tessa can catch up on the local news – eviction of tenants, dogs caught in gin traps, fortress fences round the big house – a murder occurs which makes all that has gone before pale into insignificance.

  Hollow Vengeance was originally published in 1982. 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

  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 Cricht
on, 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

  SUNDAY

  One Sunday evening towards the end of last August Elsa Carrington telephoned to invite me to spend a few days, or longer if I could manage it, at her house in the country.

  ‘I read about your play coming off,’ she explained, ‘and I thought you might be at a loose end.’

  ‘How very kind of you, Elsa! I can’t think of a better way of being out of work.’

  This was true because, although comparatively simple and unpretentious, Elsa’s house, which was called Pettits Grange and was a mile or two from the village of Sowerley, as well as her particular brand of undemanding hospitality, were such as to place her high on the list of favourite hostesses. She was quite a lot older than me, but on the other hand her two children were quite a lot younger and once or twice during the school holidays, when I was staying with my cousin Toby, who lives not far away, and when Elsa’s husband was still alive, I had been roped in to babysit for them.

  Admittedly, on these occasions the lines of demarcation were apt to become a little blurred once the grown-ups were safely out of the way, and an impartial observer might have found difficulty in distinguishing between the sitter and the sat with, nevertheless the awareness of being at least nominally in charge had made me feel pleasantly self-important and mature; and later on, after I had married and moved to London and it was the turn of Marcus and Emily to have school holidays, I had sometimes escorted them to Madame Tussaud’s arid such-like temples of Western culture, usually followed by half a dozen courses at a Chinese restaurant.

  All this had combined to make me feel as much in league with their mother’s generation as with theirs and she and I had remained on good terms ever since.

  ‘You had better hear the worst, before you plunge in too deep,’ she now said.

  ‘Oh, really? You mean there’s a catch?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it that exactly, but we do need all the help we can get for our campaign.’

  ‘What campaign is that?’

  ‘I’ll give you the details when you get here, if you still decide to come, but your main job would be to join the roster.’

  ‘Not back to babysitting again?’

  ‘No, you could really describe this as tree-sitting.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound too arduous.’

  ‘And, in fact, I was hoping it might suit you rather well. You could sit there quietly and learn your lines, without fear of interruption. At least, that’s what we hope.’

  ‘I haven’t any lines to learn at the moment,’ I admitted sadly.

  ‘Oh, that’s too bad, Tessa! Never mind, I’m sure a lovely part will turn up for you soon and, in the meantime, there’s something almost as useful for you to apply yourself to, while reclining under the tree.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘You can work out a way to prevent a murder.’

  ‘How kind of you to say that, Elsa! There have been one or two hints lately that I’m better at setting them off. I shall give my all to it, to prove everyone wrong. Do tell me, though: whose murder?’

  ‘I think that had better wait until you get here too,’ she replied, so far as I could tell without a smile. ‘We’re in a lot of trouble here just now and one can’t be too careful. Will you be driving down?’

  ‘Yes, tomorrow afternoon, if that’s okay? But don’t wait tea. You can always pack mine in a basket and I’ll eat it under the tree.’

  Robin was watching television and when Elsa had rung off I went back to the drawing room to tell him about my strange new assignment. I had taken the call on the kitchen extension, so as not to interfere with his programme, but considered myself justified in doing so now. As a member of the Metropolitan C.I.D. he is naturally all in favour of crime prevention and I felt sure the news would come as a welcome surprise.

  However, he only raised his eyebrows, warned me to take a rug, in case the grass should be damp, and went back to his American police serial.

  MONDAY P.M.

  Tea was in the kitchen and looked highly unappetising.

  ‘Keep calm!’ Elsa said, placing a jar of peanut butter between something called a banana cake and a large brown loaf resembling solidified porridge. ‘There are some real biscuits and things, if you want them. This lot is for Millie’s benefit. Fortunately, she’s not often in for meals. I think it must be in your honour that she’s gracing us with her company this afternoon.’

  ‘What’s all this supposed to do for her?’

  ‘Don’t ask me! Something to do with the anti pollution programme, I understand. It’s the latest fad and, if you want my opinion, I think she’s got the whole thing a tiny bit wrong because she’s putting on a hell of a lot of weight and I can’t see how that’s going to help the environmentalists very much.’

  Ever since her husband’s death Elsa had become increasingly bound up with her children, whom she adored, and although she often talked about them with this sort of deprecating mockery, I knew full well that anyone outside the family who dared to utter a word of criticism would be instantly felled to the ground.

  ‘The trouble is,’ she went on, ‘being a
strict vegetarian makes the poor child so desperately hungry that she fills up with all this stodge. “All very well fending off a heart attack,” I told her, “but, if you keep this up, no attractive young man is going to care whether you get one or not”.’

  ‘Do any good?’

  ‘Not the slightest. She’s off men at the moment. I expect that’s at the bottom of it, really. We reel around in a vicious circle. Oh, there you are, Millie! I was just telling Tessa about your new diet. I’m afraid you won’t find a convert in her. Just look how beautifully slim she is!’

  Emily Carrington, at this time, was a stout, somewhat pasty and inclined to be surly sixteen-year-old, who had every prospect of becoming beautiful as soon as she fined down and started preferring men to banana cake. She had inherited her mother’s combination of dark hair and dark blue eyes and she had small, elegant hands and feet, which unfortunately only accentuated the clumsy obesity which, at this period, was her most striking feature.

  If it was true that she had stayed at home in my honour, she must have decided that honour had now been satisfied because she glowered at me suspiciously, muttered ‘hello’ between clenched teeth and then ostentatiously applied herself to carving off a hunk of bread. I attributed this behaviour to self-consciousness and lack of confidence and made a mental note to take on a subsidiary task during this action-packed visit, namely to polish up her self-esteem with some liberal dollops of flattery, whenever the opportunity arose.

  All the same, it was quite a relief to know that she would not be spending much time at home, because her presence had brought an awkwardness and tension into the atmosphere, not ameliorated by the fact that Elsa, doubtless with the best intentions, appeared to be going the worst way about weaning Millie off her peculiar diet, thereby creating a really heavy mother-daughter relationship, which could hardly fail to make things uncomfortable for the guest.