Killing with Kindness Read online

  Anne Morice

  Killing with Kindness

  With no sound at all, she pitched forward head first into the punch bowl, scattering canapés and glasses in all directions.

  By all accounts, Mike Parsons is a paragon: considerate, loyal and devoted to his awkward wife – rumoured to be an alcoholic. But now he has done a vanishing act. Was he killed – and who would murder such a kind individual anyway?

  Rising young actress Tessa Crichton is unwittingly set a real puzzle in investigating the case of a man she knew and liked – but who turns out to be a more mysterious character than previously thought. Needing all her detective skill to find out what has really happened to the saintly husband, Tessa uncovers evidence that increasingly puts herself in danger.

  Killing with Kindness was originally published in 1974. This new edition features an introduction and afterword by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  ‘Anne Morice has a gift for creating intelligent, affection-generating characters, set in light and entertaining atmospheres.’ Spectator

  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), 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 Ray
mond 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

  CHAPTER ONE

  Arriving home just before noon one scorching day last July after an hour-long, live broadcasting session, I had been prodding myself into the last little spurt with promises of ten minutes under a cool shower at the end of it and was scarcely half way to my goal when the front door bell rang.

  At first glance the young woman on the doorstep was a stranger to me, though her own mother might have had trouble in recognising her, for she wore a black scarf over her head, completely obscuring her hair, and huge black sunglasses which she did not remove even when she had identified herself and been invited to step inside.

  Her name was Brenda Parsons and although I had only met her on a single, and singularly distressing occasion, I had been friendly with her husband, Mike Parsons, for several years. He was a sound recordist, permanently employed by Associated International Productions, at whose studios near Wentworth I had worked in a number of films, and in addition to being consistently helpful and patient in the professional sense he had once gone out of his way to do me an enormous personal kindness.

  It had happened right at the start of our acquaintance, on a cold and drizzly evening when I was embarking on the long trek home after a particularly arduous and frustrating day on the set. Within three minutes of turning out of the gates and heading the car towards London the engine had developed an alarming cough. After a few half-hearted attempts to control itself it gave up altogether and gently expired, only a quarter of a mile from base. Not being much of a hand at mechanics, I sat there for a while, cursing and whimpering and trying to summon the willpower to trudge back through the rain to the porter’s lodge to telephone for help, when Mike Parsons drove past. He saw me and pulled into the side of the road, then backed his car up to mine.

  I explained the predicament and, ignoring my protests, he spent about twenty minutes with his head under the bonnet, getting his hands black with grease and his legs soaking wet. He eventually tracked down the cause of the trouble, which I have now forgotten, but as the remedy depended on getting some new part or other, he offered to drive me to the nearest garage.

  Nor was this all. Having explained matters there and arranged for my car to be towed in, he then insisted on delivering me to my own front door.

  Several times during the journey I expressed my gratitude, but it was not until we reached Beacon Square that the true scale of his Samaritanism was brought home to me. I had invited him in for a drink, which he declined, explaining almost apologetically that he still had over an hour’s drive ahead of him. It then transpired that he did not live in London at all but on a new housing estate near Reading and that he had driven at least thirty miles out of his way to do me this good turn.

  Naturally we had remained on cordial terms ever since and, like numerous other people, I was always delighted when his name figured on the production unit, but we never met outside the studios. Despite his popularity, he was shy and retiring and, apart from his job, his whole life seemed to revolve round his wife, whom he referred to as Brennie, and their two little boys.

  Once or twice since then I had caught him watching me with a rather wistful expression, but I could not even get him to join me in a drink at the commissariat. He told me that he had made it a rule to give up all that kind of self-indulgence soon after he married, when all the spare cash had to be put towards a house, but my single encounter with his wife had suggested that there might be an extra reason for his abstinence.

  This was at the previous year’s Christmas Eve party at A.I.P. Studios and, as invariably does happen at these macabre festivities, most people were lashing rather heavily into the wines and spirits. I confess that it had not occurred to me that Mrs Parsons was one of the ringleaders of this contingent. She was a flat-chested, mousey little female, very prim and dim, whom I had been introduced to soon after she arrived, and during our brief conversation she had struck me as being nervous and out of her element, fumbling for her words and not making much sense out of those which occurred to her, but there was nothing specially remarkable in that and I could well have been creating pretty much the same impression on her. So it came as a shock of staggering proportions when a little later on I saw her lurch against the buffet table and then, with no sound at all, pitch forward head first into the punch bowl, scattering canapés and glasses in all directions, from which predicament she was rescued in a detached and unemotional fashion by Mike, who carried her out, apparently unconscious.

  The whole episode had been played out in only a couple of minutes, but it took the onlookers longer than that to recover. A blight descended on the party and people stood about looking shocked, embarrassed or amused, according to their natures, but none of us could pretend to be unaware of what had occurred. Just before the incident I had been talking to the stud
io manager, a somewhat sanctimonious individual named Alec Ferguson who had retained, or possibly cultivated, a strong Glaswegian accent and suitably pawky manner to match, and I asked him what could possibly have caused it.

  “Now, now, dear, don’t come the innocent! Anyone could see she’d had a wee drop too much,” he replied, making a tilting gesture with his glass, lest his meaning escape me.

  “Well yes,” I admitted, “I agree that’s the simple answer, but I don’t understand how anyone could have got so drunk so fast. They’d only been here for about twenty minutes. Perhaps she was genuinely ill? Do you think someone ought to go and find out? It could be serious.”

  “Oh, it’s serious all right, make no mistake,” Alec informed me loftily. “And I respect your charitable construction of the matter, but the truth is more likely that she was stoned when she got here. Poor old Mike!” he added with a lachrymose sigh.

  “You mean this kind of thing has happened before?”

  “Oh aye, she’s quite celebrated for it. Had you not heard?”

  “No, but I never met her until this evening.”

  “And that’s no surprise either. The poor laddie usually manages to keep her out of temptation’s way, but she certainly made up for her lost ground tonight. It’s a terrible thing for a decent chap like him to be saddled with such a burden.”

  Recalling this conversation as Brenda and I confronted each other in the hall, I was disturbed to see that her hands were trembling violently, obliging her to place her bag on the table, and the fact that she had not removed her sunglasses was also open to a rather depressing interpretation. However, social custom dies hard and when she had stammered out a request that I should spare her a few minutes and we had moved into the drawing room, I found myself automatically offering her a drink.