Death of a Wedding Guest Read online

  Anne Morice

  Death of a Wedding Guest

  ‘Poor woman, how she must wish she had never come!’

  Prophetic words, if ever I heard any.

  The actress Tessa Crichton’s cousin Ellen is engaged – but to someone she has known only a fortnight. The man appears rich, presentable and mad about Ellen, but Tessa is worried about the reaction of his former amoureuse, and indeed about that of Ellen’s own ex-boyfriend, a bibulous and self-pitying actor.

  Plans go ahead for a splendid white wedding, and the scene is set for a gathering of various eccentric and tiresome relations – foremost in tiresomeness the bride’s mother.

  Just before the speeches one of the guests collapses and dies; and a host of clues, suspects and possible motives appear. The elegant Tessa investigates with her usual mixture of observation and intuition, helped by her Scotland Yard detective husband Robin. Another murder is in the offing before we reach the surprising yet plausible conclusion to an entertaining matrimonial whodunnit.

  Death of a Wedding Guest was originally published in 1976. This new edition features an introduction and afterword by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  ‘As always, a bright and amusing style . . . a general air of sophisticated writing.’ New York Times

  ‘Relaxing, polished entertainment of high order.’ 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 surp
rises [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

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Times, 24th April.

  MR J. ROXBURGH AND MISS E.S.R. CRICHTON.

  The marriage has been arranged and will take place shortly between Jeremy, elder son of Mr and Mrs Arnold Roxburgh of 149, Chester Square, S.W.1, and Long Barn House, near Sunningdale, Berkshire, and Ellen Sarah Rachel, only daughter of Mr Toby Crichton of Roakes Common, Oxfordshire, and of Mrs Irene Lewis of 1818B Princess Alexandra Drive, Winnipeg.

  ‘Do we know this J. Roxburgh?’ I enquired of my cousin Toby, having telephoned him in the desperation born of three futile attempts to obtain the information from the horse’s mouth.

  ‘We presume Ellen does, so why not ask her?’

  ‘I tried that, naturally, but there’s no reply from her flat. I suppose she’s sleeping it off.’

  ‘Or else that witch she lives with has decided that it is not a propitious day for answering the telephone. As it happens, though, I doubt if Ellen could tell you much more than I can. She has only known him for a couple of weeks. I think it must be what they call the rebound.’

  ‘From Desmond?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘In that case, it could be a bound in the right direction. I never had much time for Desmond. He’s a grossly over-rated actor, whatever the critics may say, and invariably stoned from noon till dusk, the only time I ever had to work with him. At least this Jeremy sounds a bit more on the solid side. All those posh addresses do inspire a certain confidence. Nothing in Scotland, though.’

  ‘Is that your criterion in solidity or poshness?’

  ‘Neither, but Roxburgh has north-of-the-border connotations.’

  ‘My dear Tessa, a lot of people are called Parsons, but it doesn’t follow that they’re all clergymen. I understand this lot started life as Rosenbergs, or something of that kind. Don’t you find that strange? I’m sure if my name had been Roxburgh I should have lost no time in changing it to Rosenberg, but they tell me it takes all sorts.’

  ‘You surely don’t mean that Roxburgh, Toby?’

  ‘Don’t I?’

  ‘Not the one who keeps running up all those mighty hotels and office blocks?’

  ‘Just so. Most of them collapse just before the official opening, but unfortunately not all.’

  ‘But they must be absolutely rolling?’

  ‘Well, as to that, it doesn’t do to judge by posh addresses. For all we know, the core may be rotten and he’ll come crashing down some day just as surely as one of his own concrete monstrosities.’

  ‘We must hope not, for Ellen’s sake.’

  ‘It would certainly provide a testing time for her, if she is marrying for money. Do you suppose that could be the springboard for this rebound?’

  ‘Unlikely, I should have thought.’

  ‘And you should know. You’re her second cousin, after all, and much more her generation than I can ever be. On the other hand, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that her mother was money mad.’

  ‘Oh yes, Irene; I saw she’d been included in the announcement. Will she be coming over for the wedding?’

  ‘Not if I can prevent it.’

  ‘And you think you can?’

  ‘The mood is one of cautious optimism. Ellen asked if I thought we should cable her and I advised her to leave all those boring details to me. With any luck, that’ll be the last we’ll hear of it. If the worst comes to the worst, we must get Ellen’s friend, Jezebel, to send Irene a diagram showing all the evil omens fighting it out over mid-Atlantic during the crucial week. That should scare her off.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘Do have a squashed fly!’ Jezebel said, lazily proffering the plate of biscuits, ‘it looks as though there are one or two underneath which haven’t been mauled by Caspar.’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said, appearances having belied her claim. Jezebel who, with her husband and son, shared a flat with Ellen in Beauchamp Place, was a dedicated zodiac interpreter and priestess. She contributed a monthly page to a popular magazine and, although meticulous and painstaking in her work, was inclined to be slapdash in mundane affairs, a characteristic which was reflected in her manner and appearance. She had an overblown look about her, emphasised by the voluminous garments in which she habitually trailed about. This was in sharp contrast to Ellen who, at the age of nineteen, had the vital statistics of a pencil, although at that moment making a hearty meal of bread and butter and honey.

  Jezebel’s husband was called Bert and was part owner of a snooty and expensive restaurant
in Kensington known as Chey Bert. The joke here was that the other half of the partnership was a man called Cheyne, as some of the uninitiated clientèle were chastened to discover when they pointed to the apparent misspelling.

  Caspar, the only child of this union, was a pale, noble-browed infant of three years old, although possessing an I.Q., so I was reliably informed, of one twice his age. Observing him now, as he tottered round the room, stuffing handfuls of food into his face, idly smearing his sticky fingers along the furniture, and watching with profound absorption as the milk from his tilted mug dribbled in a thin line over the carpet, it occurred to me that here, rather than in money madness, might lie the root of Ellen’s decision to change her life-style. It was two years since she had become co-tenant of this large, comfortable and untidy flat and no one could fail to see that it had grown progressively smaller, more untidy and less comfortable with every subsequent stage of Caspar’s development.

  This reflection reminded me of the purpose of my visit and simultaneously, with a flash of the E.S.P. which Jezebel’s presence so often invoked, Ellen said:

  ‘I suppose you wouldn’t consider being a matron of honour?’

  ‘No, thanks awfully. It always sounds a bit dowdy, and also rather like a cake.’

  She sighed and poured herself another cup of tea:

  ‘I was afraid of that. The trouble is that you can’t be a bridesmaid, now you’re married to Robin, and I seem to be rather short on female relatives. Jeremy has a whole string of cousins and nieces, all set to prance up the aisle, and it would have been nice to have had just one from our side.’

  ‘I’ve offered her Caspar as a page,’ Jezebel explained, ‘but she doesn’t want to know.’