Dead on Cue Read online

  Anne Morice

  Dead on Cue

  ‘Ever heard of the Alibi Club?,’ Robin asked when he was driving me home after one of the most disastrous first nights in theatrical history.

  When Tessa’s Scotland Yard husband Robin is invited to speak at the renowned and respectable Alibi Club, she is excited to be surrounded by the members – all mystery writers of the first rank – although one is missing.

  Crime novelist and playwright William Montgomerie has died, leaving behind a widow and a lost manuscript. His former spouse, Gwen, suddenly blossoms into literary fame after years of struggling in the shadows. The splendidly eccentric Myrtle Sprygge, whose clairvoyant powers and old relationship with Montgomerie further complicate the situation, and lead Tessa to wonder whether Gwen is taking credit for something she didn’t write. When Gwen is found murdered, everyone wonders what – and who – could have triggered such revenge.

  Dead on Cue was originally published in 1985. This new edition features an introduction and afterword by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  ‘A light hand, an engaging ease, and an inventive mind: all welcome qualities in the writing of crime novels.’ Financial Times

  ‘What makes her such good company – and the whole point of Miss Morice’s book is to converse, as it were, with Tessa Crichton – is not her deductive skill but her shrewd eye and quick tongue for people and situations.’ 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

  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

  ‘Ever heard of the Alibi Club?,’ Robin asked when he was driving me home after one of the most disastrous first nights in theatrical history.

  ‘No, never. It sounds more up your street than mine.’

  ‘The sort of club that provides false alibis at cut prices to members who get into bad odour with Scotland Yard, you mean? Yes, I daresay there are a few of those knocking around, but this is quite different. Eminently respectable, in fact. The membership is restricted to forty and they’re all top flight mystery writers. It started with a bunch of old fashioned classic detective novelists, but they’re getting thinner on the ground now, so the umbrella’s been extended to include science fiction and so on. They have no premises of their own, but they meet informally four times a year for dinner in some Soho restaurant, whose name for the moment escapes me.’

  ‘But what gave you the idea that I would know anything about it? Or were you just pulling any old subject out of the air to take my mind off the current tragedy in my life?’

  ‘Well, that too, I suppose, but this happens to be one which has been very much on my own mind for some time now. I haven’t mentioned it before because, what with dress rehearsals and previews and raving hysteria, which have set the pattern of our daily lives just recently, there has hardly been an opportunity. And the reason why I thought you might have heard of it was that your old friend, William Montgomerie, had been a member for over twenty years.’

  ‘It’s stretching it a bit to refer to him as my old friend. I only met him half a dozen times and we never discussed anything much except the script and how he saw the character I was playing. I didn’t even know whether he was married until I read the obituary.’

  ‘All the same, you liked and admired him, did you not?’

  ‘Very much. It was a marvellous script and I had a wonderful part in it. What more could one ask from any writer? I can imagine he might have been a terror in the home, though. He was a prima donna of a perfectionist, for a start, which always makes impossible demands on other people. Single-minded and egocentric, too. I daresay that applies to a good many writers.’

  ‘Maybe, I wouldn’t know. Was he married?’

  ‘Twice. He was divorced from his first wife and I don’t know what became of her. The following year he married Gwen somebody or other, who survives him.’

  ‘What a memory!’

  ‘Well, it was only a few months after we’d finished filming, so naturally I was interested. What is all this leading up to, by the way? Is there some rumour now going round that he did not die from natural causes and you’ve had orders to make a few discreet enquiries?’

  ‘Far from it. I was simply hoping that, having known Montgomerie personally and got on so well with him, you might be able to tell me something I ought to know about the members of the Alibi Club.’

  ‘Why? What have they ever done to you?’

  ‘Something rather dreadful. They have invited me to speak at their next dinner, on the twenty-third of this month.’

  ‘No! Have they really? But how marvellous! Can it mean that you’re becoming a celebrity and I hadn’t even noticed?’

  ‘God forbid. One of those in the family is quite enough. Also, when I said they’d invited me, I was laying it on a bit. What happened was that our revered Assistant Commissioner had been dragooned into being their guest of honour on this occasion, but a week ago he discovered, to his immense relief, no doubt, that it clashed with some official function which took priority, so he was able to slide out gracefully. Asked to suggest a substitute from among the underlings, he had the bright idea of putting me up for it and I daresay it would not enhance my chances of promotion if I were to refuse.’

  ‘And why should you want to? But what’s all this talk about speeches and guests of honour? I thought you said these dinners were informal?’

  ‘As a rule, they are, but every so often, as with this one, they all dress up in their best shrouds and put on a gala occasion to welcome the new member.’

  ‘Willie’s death having created a vacancy, of course. Am I invited?’

  ‘You most certainly are. I have a strong suspicion that you are really to blame for this awful prospect which now hangs over me. The A.C., correctly no doubt, reckoned that my charm and personality might not be enough to draw the crowds, but with Theresa Crichton in tow I should get by. I’ve gone so far as to interpolate a few remarks in my speech about your being such a dedicated crime fiction addict, which should do me a bit of good, but I had to e
xplain to Nigel Banks, who is the President, that in fact he will have to find an understudy for you, as next Thursday week you will be engaged elsewhere.’

  ‘Which turns out to have been over-optimistic. If the reviews are half as bad as I expect them to be, I shall be out of work long before Thursday week.’

  ‘Well, that wouldn’t be all bad, from my point of view, although I hope for your sake that you’re now being over-pessimistic.’

  ‘Thank you, Robin. I hope so too, although it might be fun to change roles for once. This time I should be the one to sit looking nonchalant and composed, with my hands clenched under the table, in case you forget your lines or start sneezing just as you reach the climax.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that’s the kind of torment I go through when I’m watching you?’

  ‘Do you deny it?’

  ‘Not entirely, but I believe I am getting hardened at last. And I’d swop it any day of the week for having to be the one to stand up and make an ass of myself in public.’ This was not quite the style in which I would have chosen to hear my artistic endeavours described, but I reminded myself that it was most likely destined to sound like flattery, compared to the insults which were even now being sharpened up in time for the morning editions.

  He did not sneeze or forget his lines. On the contrary, his twelve minute speech was delivered with almost professional grace and timing, which was just as it should have been, three days of unemployment having enabled me to put him through a remorseless rehearsal course.

  Prominent among those who came up to congratulate him, after the vote of thanks from the President, was an elderly woman wearing what appeared to be a purple silk tent. She was large and straight-backed, with Grecian features and lots of dyed red hair, and had she been auditioning for the part of Cleopatra’s grandmother during a stormy period of her life, she would have got it without opening her mouth. Her luminous dark eyes were huge and tragic, but the corners of her mouth kept turning up in a catlike smile of irresistible humour and charm.