Krimi – Page 11 – Political theory and practice

The War of the Worlds Murder (2005) by Max Allan Collins.

Goodreads meta-data is 256 pages, rated 3.71 by 276 litizens.

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Fun but flabby

When CBS executives pressured Orson Welles to reduce the verisimilitude of the script for the Halloween broadcast in 1938, his standard defence was that no one would be stupid enough to think it real. Ah, he should have paid more attention to P. T. Barnum. There is always someone that stupid with many friends, just look at the White House today.

In 1938 Welles was an infant terrible of twenty-three years already with a string of theatrical triumphs behind him. While he was a creative genius, as well he knew, he needed help and founded the Mercury Theatre with John Houseman to produce his genius. Yes, that John Houseman.

Welles never did one thing at a time; while he continued to stage dramas for the Mercury Theatre on Broadway, he also branched out with the Mercury Theatre of the Air, while simultaneously writing scripts for movies. If he had fewer than three separate and independent projects to work on in a day, he became bored.

Welles own career in radio started with that voice as the caped avenger in ‘The Shadow,’ who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men, rivalling Santa Claus in contravening of the NSW Privacy Laws. To return to this yarn Welles is hatching a new project and he brings into the tent the writer of ‘The Shadow’ stories from earlier years, Walter Gibson, who is the narrator thereafter.

Gibson is no ingénue but even he is swept up in the profligate and prodigious energy that Welles exudes, and — since all expenses are paid — he goes along for the ride. He enters just as the Mercury Theatre of the Air is rehearsing for The War of the Worlds. It is fascinating to read of the organised chaos that produced live-to-air radio in 1938. While on air and in role before the microphone Welles scribbles new lines for the other players to whom he hands them.

Genius he may be, but that most levelheaded of men, Houseman, knows Welles is riding for fall, and he tries to reign Welles in, again and again. Ditto the CBS executive who delivers the budget, but who also wants to curb the enthusiasms of the Wunderkind least the corporate goodwill evaporate taking the money with it. Gibson observes all of this with wry detachment.

The Welles that emerges in these pages conforms to the general impression. Genius, yes, without a doubt, charming and charismatic to get his way. But also he can be crude, rude, and arrogant by turns. And ever theatrical in appearance, tone, and movement. He could turn the taps on for love or hate with equal ease and switch between them in a breath, because he did not mean any of it. Not so much that he was insincere, as like an Olympian god, he was indifferent to the matters of mere mortals. (What a comeuppance then to spend all those later years pitching for Findus frozen peas and Paul Masson wine in television advertisements. These make painful viewing on You Tube. How low the Olympian fell before the long arc of justice.)

Every time Houseman forced a compromise on him after much resistance and rancour, Welles would give in with lavish good grace, and promptly undermine the agreement. To give an example, if CBS insisted that no real names be used. He made up names that in the script did not look like real names but when said with certain inflections — which he coached the actors to do — sounded like real names of people or places. When CBS said the script cannot have a simulated President Roosevelt speaking, after hours of angry resistance, Welles conceded by substituting a Secretary of the Interior. He then cast as the Secretary an actor famous for his perfect impersonation of FDR. And so on.

So Houseman decided to teach Welles a lesson he would not forget – SPOILER ALERT — by framing him for murder! As an accomplished producer Houseman knows everything about staging and with the help of a woman scorned he fakes a murder scene with Welles’s name written all over it – literally, for Welles to find a few hours before the ‘The War of the Worlds Broadcast.’ That’ll tame him was Houseman’s hope. A subdued Welles could then be guided to moderate the realism of the upcoming broadcast, thought Houseman.

Yes the frame-up did stun Welles, but the show must go on and, if anything, the spectre of the murder fired him to make even greater effort in the broadcast. Houseman had underestimated his man.

I said ‘flabby’ above because I found the pages padded with endless and pointless descriptions of clothes, decor, food, and the appearance of players who walk across the page. Buried in this verbiage is short story that is a corker, notwithstanding the fact there is almost no investigation, no psychological depth, just an elaborate prank within an even more elaborate prank. But the evocation of radio drama was fascinating and I intend to listen to a few from Audible, starting with ‘The Shadow!’ On a similar note I read years ago, and have dredged up the reference thanks to the app Book Collector, John Dunning, Two O’Clock Eastern Wartime (2001). It too evokes the magic of radio in 1942.

A number of other items related to Welles’s ‘The War of the Worlds’ broadcast have been discussed on the blog, including Ed Murrow’s documentary on it and Hadley Cantril’s study The Invasion from Mars (1940). Seek and ye may find.

It turns out there were plenty of people dumb enough to believe that invasion story, despite the station breaks, the newspaper advertisements, the fabricated place names, the incorrect terminology, the elapsed time, and any number of radio-addicted children who recognised the voices of the actors. These people vote, drive cars, and have opinions. Think of that. Look around, they are your neighbours today.

Collins is a writing industry from his Iowa home with a number of series. This one is in a set of so-called Disaster novels, that centre on a real, or in this case imagined, disaster, e.g., the Hindenburg crash, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the London Blitz, or the assassination of Huey Long. In them he mixes real people of the time and place with some fictional ones to stir the pot. He does a great deal of research for the context, but anachronisms still appear, as he admitted in the afterword to this novel. These always jar.

Mick Herron, Joe Country (2019)

The meta-data is 352 pages from Amazon, rated 4.5 by five litizens. It is not on GoodReads yet.

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Whoosh!

The denizen of Slough House are joined by a new Regent Park cast-off named Lech Wicinski, who had child pornography on his MI5 laptop. How dumb was that! So dumb that only a robot would suppose it true, and once supposed off Lech goes to the endless exile of Slough House, while his girlfriend (tipped off by an anonymous caller) goes ballistic and walks out. Just when it seems things cannot get worse he meets Jackson Lamb. Worse now has a name.

Of course Lamb does not believe anyone is that dumb but he does not care about injustice, as long as it leaves him alone. In another dumb move this injustice bumps into Lamb and he goes to work, as only he can. Though the beautiful Emma Flyte, briefly head dog at the Park, refuses reassignment to Slough House after falling afoul of the very malevolent Diana Taverner on the First Desk, she pitches in when Slough House denizen Louisa Guy (even more unstable than usual) sets off for Wales in deep winter, while Catherine Standish, sober for now, tries to corral Jackson Lamb with no success. Situation normal.

The meta-data does not lie. There are 352 pages but they flew by.

The office politics that Lady Di gets up to are straight out of McKinsey, and the absolute depravity of her political masters would make Pox News executives envious, the contract thugs loose in Wales are there to murder a child who saw something (though I was never quite sure what) and it is all in a day’s work for them. Bien sûr, Taverner was not so stupid as to believe Lech had pornography on his lap top but she exiled him faire encourager les autres. While whoever planted the material on his laptop may be a security threat, she is more interested in using the incident to terrorise subordinates into even more slavish obedience than fixing the leak. To fix it would mean revealing that the leak occurred on her watch. Lady Di does not admit to errors! With priorities like that is it any wonder she has risen to the top in the world where managers manage per McKinsey?

As usual there are thrills and spills with the Slow Horses from Slough House. Emma gets her pretty face shot off, Lech was not cut out to be a field agent and gets cut to pieces, Cartwright survives to keep feeling sorry for himself, Louisa likewise is surprised to be alive along with the intended victim, Catherine is even more tedious sober than when drunk, and Jackson Lamb could not care less as long as the world leaves him alone.

Meanwhile, back at Regent’s Park, Lady Di plans her next move up the greasy pole, enumerating the heads she will step on to get there. She is always sure the enemies are inside the tent, not outside. Meanwhile, the German plant in the Park who engineered the distracting pornography remains in place undetected. That plant may be a threat to national security but it is no threat to Lady Di – so all is good at the First Desk.

Helen Tursten, Night Rounds (2012)

Goodreads meta-data is 336 pages, rated 3.78 by 2817 litizens.

Genre: krimi

Verdict: meticiulous

Inspector Irene Huss is on the job after a nurse is murdered in a private hospital. This is the second instalment in the series following ‘Detective Inspector’ Huss (2004). As the police go to work the staff of the hospital, its owners, the medical consultants, patients and their visitors are questioned, and the interstices of the nineteenth century building are examined. Tursten knows this world well from her earlier career as a nurse.

What follow is a police procedural rich in the locale both the city of Göteborg and of the hospital. Its principal owner is the surgeon in chief, who has a trophy wife and the debts to prove it. It is February and the freezing rain becomes a pivotal character in the plot. When the temperature rises to freezing, it is cause for smiles, but when it rains and then freezes again, there are no more smiles but plenty of black ice.

There is a split among the nurses, some have been working at this hospital since it was owned by the surgeon’s father, and others are twenty year old contractors who come and go. The old guard nurses are loyal to the past, including its ghost, and the contractors just want to get paid. Ghosts or not, there are some haunted characters in this hospital of Otranto.

Even as Huss and the team investigate more murderers occur that may be related or may not. Along the way we see street people who have long since become non-persons to the social services, some faked qualifications that no one has the time or interest to check, and Huss herself is so preoccupied with things at home (two teenage children, a dog, and a husband in that order of priority) that she makes mistakes.

While her immediate superior tries hard, his roots are in the old school when women made the coffee and they show through, but Huss grits her teeth and bears it. Both that such sexism is present and that Huss ignores it, riles some GoodReads reviewers who qualify for the Snow Flake Award. Curiously one such writer condemns the books as easily forgotten and then dwells on this sexism in detail. It seems the writer both forgot the book and remembered it. Take that Aristotle, a thing can be itself and not at the same time. So much for the law of the excluded middle.

I have also read ‘Fire Dance’ (2014) and liked it.

Helen Tursten, An Elderly Lady up to No Good (2018).

Goodreads meta-data is 173 pages, rated 3.85 by 2859 litizens.

Genre: Krimi

Verdict: Predicable.

A Swedish widow in Götenborg, the eighty-eight year old Maud, lives in an enormous, inherited flat that is the envy of many. She appears harmless and helpless, yet she is in fact irascible and deft at turning the perceptions and prejudices about elderly ladies against others in five loosely linked stories (or is it incidents) in the collection. The covetous neighbour is bamboozled and strung up by her own mobile, the aggressive tourist got stuck in the wrong place by a knitting needle, an antique dealer trying to con her out of her belongings finds himself no longer growing old – and so on. Maud leaves a string of bodies behind her.

When Inspector Irene Huss (there is an in-joke here) notices that Maud’s name keeps coming up on reports about these deaths, she smiles and moves on. What could a harmless and helpless old woman do anyway. Why nothing at all.

Except…!

While the stories were repetitive, Tursten’s afterword about the stimulating challenge to write about a perpetrator rather than a plod was charming, but not quite in proportion to the reading it took to get there.

The Promised Land (2019) by Barry Maitland

Goodreads meta-data is 321 pages, rated 4.16 by 167 litizens.

Genre: Krimi

Verdict: Masterful, again.

In the thirteenth instalment of this series David Brock has gone into an uneasy retirement, and his protégé Kathy Kolla has been promoted to Detective Chief Inspector. When Hampstead Heath becomes a killing field for the screenwriter’s old crutch, the serial killer, Kolla mobilises and strikes, arresting the unlikely but clearly implicated small-time publisher John Pettigrew who lives nearby. Forensic evidence points to him, as do witness statements.

Pettigrew’s brief entices Brock into acting as a private inquiry agent to see what can be seen. While Brock is reluctant, he finds Pettigrew convincing and he is bored in retirement so he begins to turn over stones before he realised Kolla was the officer in charge, leading him into conflict with her.

There are more twists and turns and after another murder forensic evidence and witness statements in this case now implicate Brock, who finds himself on remand. At first he treats confinement as a joke, then a mistake, then a respite, then he registers that it is not going to end. Angry as she is at Brock for sticking his nose in, Kolla is dead certain he is innocent and whips herself and her team into a frenzy to put it altogether piece by piece. Kolla seems to have outgrown her constant hormone attacks of earlier novels in the series. In these pages she concentrates on the job, not on feeling sorry for herself.

While the summary above may be conventional, the execution is so deft, so focussed, so speedy that the reader will not find it stale or clichéd. One of the nicest aspects of these books is the author does not find it necessary to create false tensions, e.g., by having an interfering and incompetent superior. Kolla’s boss wants results and works hard at making sure that happens. There are no stupid cops forgetting to lock doors, or smoking round the back while evidence disappears. If anything, these police are almost too good to be true, even the one who was ready to believe anything to get a result concludes it cannot be that easy.

Barry Maitland

The tension is in the master narrative and not distracting sidelines. And like the first entry in this stable, ‘The Marx Sisters’ (1994), discussed on an entry on my unlearned blog, at the heart of the mystery is a book, and what a book it is.

M J Trow, ‘Lestrade and the Sign of the Nine’ (2000).

Good Reads meta-data is 223 pages, rated 3.91 by a scant 46 litizens

Genre: krimi, pastiche

Verdict: clever and refreshing, but with a sour aftertaste.

In the world of Victorian England in the year 1886 all is not right with the world. Across the green land the (lecherous) rector, the (plagiarist) novelist, and the (cheating) speculator have one thing in common: they were murdered! There is only man for this job: Sholto Lestrade, Inspector, Scotland Yard. Maybe so but while he gets on with it and another five seemingly respectable Victorians are murdered and each, it turns out, was a despicable villain beneath the veneer of respectablility. With each of the eight victims is an inscrutable symbol [see front cover below].

As Lestade goes hither and thither, arriving always too late to stop the next murder, he keeps running across an annoying prat accompanied by a bumbling doctor, Holmes and Watson they are by name. Lestrade has neither the time nor the patience to sort these two out, but why are they always underfoot. Indeed, who are they?

The book opens with workmen excavating a foundation where they find a limbless body in between discussing Georg Hegel’s influence on Karl Marx’s philosophy of history in a cockney accent so thick it took this reader sometime to realise what they were talking about, but when dawned the realisation there followed the guffaws. So unexpected! So well done! That alone was worth the price of admission.

Lestrade manages to avoid the tide of history, but has to deal with two, one after another in quick succession, Home Secretaries who want a immediate resolution without any fuss, no expenditure, and no inquiry into respectable gentlemen, as well as machine guns, while dreading his inadvertent agreement to appear in the Police Annual Review for Charity to imitate Sarah Bernhardt.

That would seem to be more than enough, Yet there is also larded through it some racism, homophobia, and sexism. While these attitudes reflect the Victorian times, they do not advance the plot, limn any character development, or enrich the context. What they do is distract and irritate the contemporary reader. They are, in short, gratuitous. Strangely in this day when virtue display is so routine few reviewers on either GoodReads or Amazon refer to this business. I would have thought it offered a perfect chance to strut one’s virtue.

This title is number 12 in the Sholto Lestrade Mysteries from the industrious Trow who also has two other series since he cannot keep his hands off the keyboard.

I’d be willing to try another Lestrade in the hope that the racism, sexism, homophobia was not ingrained in the writing. But only one, least the Victorian setting licenses the author’s prejudices.

‘Death Shall Overcome’ (1974) by Emma Lathen.

GoodReads meta-data is 206 pages, rated 4.0 by 113 litizens,
Genre: Krimi
Death Overcome.jpg
Verdict: Most welcome!
On Wall Street in the early 1970s investment banker John Putnam Thatcher reluctantly is drawn into a fight over the appointment of a new partner in a client firm. In that family firm one partner has died and the workload is piling up until a new one can be found. Nothing new in that.
But in this case the head of the firm is an irascible game player in his 80s who cares not a whit for convention and has no heirs to drop anchor on him. His final beau geste is to appoint a black man to the firm and nominate him for a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. While the Board of Governors of the Exchange can be relied up to be colour blind in considering the nomination, not so the clients of the firm or other members of the exchange. The black candidate is a well-qualified and immensely successful banker himself.
But the southern clients react and the southerners in the firms go off the rails at the idea of working for ‘one of them,’ as an analyst says while slamming doors. The racism is visceral and pronounced. There is one grotesque scene at a gala at the Lincoln Center when a racists stock broker of some wealth berates one and all, but most of all the hapless Thatcher for treating with ‘one of them,’ though this apostle of purity does not use such an oblique term. The racist then descends into an incomprehensible rant that today can only bring to mind President Tiny.
Amid all this conflict another of the partners of the firm is poisoned and dies. While a sniper per the cover art takes a shot at the black nominee. Thatcher starts putting two and two together.
Needless to say the obvious candidates are too stupid, impetuous, incompetent to murder anyone but the language, civility, and reason. As is to be expected, the least likely one did it!
This is part of a long running series, many of which I read in paperback years ago, perhaps even this one, though the mists of time have closed over it. This time I had on Kindle. The setting is evoked but not with crushing pedantry, the characters are many and differentiated, there is mystery rather than gore, and the dialogue is acerbic and droll. While the police are never central, they are portrayed as competent, focussed, and determined, not figures of ridicule to make Thatcher look better. He has no need of straw men to look good. Miss Corso, Thatcher’s office retainer, is a marvel of indifference to everything but her duties and in this single-minded application she invariably makes Thatcher feel he does not live up to her standard. Enuf said.
Emma Lathen is a partnership of two Harvard graduates in business, Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Henissart. They wrote twenty-four Thatcher novels and another seven set in Congress with another protagonist. The first appeared in 1961 but it was only in 1977 that their names became known. The secret had been successfully kept secret for fifteen years.

‘A Picture of Murder’ ( 2018 ) by T E Kinsey

Goodreads meta-data is 320 pages rated 4.31 by 2455 litizens.
Genre: krimi, period
Picture of Murder.jpg
Verdict: ambiguous.
In the heart of Little England at fictitious Littleton Cotterell in 1909 wealthy Lady Hardcastle and her redoubtable retainer Florence Armstrong, the maid of all work, including sleuthing, are settled in a Midsomer picturesque village in the southwest near Bristol. Flo narrates with a sharp eye and a sharper tongue.
Then the kinematographers come to the village, and by a mischance Lady Hardcastle offers them a roof. They had been scheduled to stay at a neighboring estate but a mysterious fire in the kitchen has made that impossible.
The kinematograpers screen an 18-minute film about the undoing of a witch to the protests of Republicans who see in filums the devil’s work. Meanwhile an aggrieved rival of the kinematographers appears at the pub with a tame journalist in tow. By the way the kinematographers include the film actors four. Finally some travelling musicians pop-in to muddy the waters and provoke a tiresome double backstory. Whew! Now that the cast is assembled, the mayhem can begin.
Because the kinematograph is the work of the devil, Christian vigilantes appears to picket, to protest, and cause trouble. The local vicar has some choice words to say about such pious thuggery that reminded me of many current tiny minds. For the Vicar God takes delight in the achievements of His creation. He’s sophisticated and wise and understands the subtleties of Man’s ingenious inventions. On the other hand, the self-proclaimed pious thugs exhibit resourcefulness only in their careful selection of scriptural texts to support small-mindedness, combing misquoted Bible verses and threats of eternal damnation.
Then the morning after celebrating until late tthe screening of the film, one of the actor is found, dressed in role, dead just as his character died in the film. The villagers were agog at seeing a film for the first time to begin with and the death — of course it had to be murder — drives one and all round the nearest bend. His death confirms the Christian thugs in their many prejudices.
The well meaning local plods are lost and Bristol CID sends in Inspector who is old mates with Her Ladyship and Strongarm. Since he has many other krims on the go back in the city, he more or less delegates the investigation to Lady and Maid.
Before you can say this is nonsense the leading lady is found dead, also in-role, in Lady Hardcastle’s very own kitchen! That makes it personal!
The Christian vigilantes make Prime Suspects. Then there is an artistic rival whose has dogged the steps of the kinematograpers across the land.

Along the way there are lessons about village life, the state of film-making at the time, the hills and dales around Bristol, and an insufferable load of banter between Hardcastle and Strongarm that pads out the story near to tedium. But they do some ratiocination to sort through all the parti-coloured herrings, which are many.
T E Kinsy.jpg T. E. Kinsey
The approach is more didactic than I can usually abide but in this case the information is well integrated and tossed off in portions. However, I found the insertion of a lengthy double backstory first about the tender years of Strongarm and then the adventures of Lady Hardcastle distracting, tedious, and limp, the more so considering this is number four in the series. Likewise the two travelling minstrels who show up again are simply there to cue the backstories not to move this one forward, and their message about the menacing German is left on the cutting room floor, or should have been since it is not resolved. I expect it is a tease for the next volume in the series. Is it any wonder that some readers grind their teeth?

‘The Cardinal’s Court’ ( 2017) by Cora Harrison.

GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages rated 4.00 by 44 litizens.
Genre: krimi, period
cardinals court.jpg
Verdict: [Not sure.]
Henry VIII together with his queen, Katharine, is in residence at Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s folly, Hampton Court built in 1515 it has all modern conveniences, namely hot and cold running servants. Flemish tapestries to reduce draughts, decorated fire buckets at every fire place, and more. Wolsey is chief minister to the mercurial King, having built the palace to serve as a royal residence, as a diplomatic embassy, and as his own residence. Thus forty rooms are reserved for the royal party, and another forty set aside for visiting diplomats, and so on. Kitchens, stables, latrines are sufficient to service a thousand guests. Imagine that. Well maybe that is TMI.
The building is baroque and so are the people. The intrigues are many. There are rivals for the king’s favour. There are conflicts over inheritances among the courtiers. There are sexual liaisons, financial corruption, and the like. Queen Kathrine has produced no male heir, and that is a storm brewing that readers realise more than the characters with our hindsight.
It is the very cold Lent of 1522 when into this happy throng comes Hugh Mac Egan from Ireland, a lawyer sent to prepare a marriage contract for the son of his client, the Earl of Ormond. The boy, James, is a page to the Cardinal, along with eleven other youths, heirs to mighty lords of the land. James’s intended is Anne Boleyn.
She dominates much of the early going. Indeed, too much for this reader. She is described at least four times before my trigger finger got itchy and I started flicking pages whenever she appeared. Her lustrous eyes, her swaying carriage, her husky voice, her almond face, her clear skin, her gleaming hair, her ……. Enough. She is way out of James’s league but no one seems to notice that, apart from the lady herself, who has another in mind, another page at this stage, young Harry Percy who is the scion of the Earl of Northumberland, who is Midas rich. She spends a lot of time rubbing Harry up the right way.
Then, it seems during a Lentan meal with the king present, a courtier is murdered, and the circumstantial evidence points to James. Hugh undertakes his defence, in between recitations of Boleyn’s features. While much is made of the fact that the crime occurred in the king’s presence the investigation is lethargic to say the least. There is a jurisdictional dispute between the king’s sheriff and the cardinal’s over whose case it is. That has potential but since both of this officers are portrayed as dimwits, it is not developed.
Much is made of the difference between Irish and English law, but that does not effect the plot. It is simply a didactic aside.
Queen Katharine is shown to be much more than the religious zealot to which she is usually reduced in the popular culture. She is well aware of the currents eddying and swirling around the court, and offers Hugh some insightful and intelligent assistance so subtlety that he almost misses it while enumerating Boleyn’s attributes. The queen is an old hand at seeming to do nothing while doing something in a court where her every gesture is noted, codified, catalogued, recorded, reported, and analysed.
Likewise, as all powerful as Wolsey appears from afar, he is well aware that everything depends on Henry’s indulgence, and judging the limits of that indulgence is tricky from day to day with such a changeable man. Best therefore to do little by halves, always checking the wind.
One of the pillars of the krimi is the rush to judgement. A crime occurs. Officials latch onto a suspect and declare guilt. Case closed. Our hero then struggles to re-open the case and to defend the suspect. There is never much of an explanation, if any, about why the officials are satisfied to let the real culprit escape while they convict an innocent. It cannot be just incompetence else they are not worthy of the steel of our hero, so they have reasons, which usually amount to a bribe. Yet in accepting a bribe to permit a murder, they expose themselves to a like risk and more. It seldom adds up. Life can be like that but not literature.
Sometimes period krimis have too much period exposition and not enough krimi (mystery, investigation, surmise). Authors having done extensive research want to make use of all they learned and the exercise becomes didactic not entertainment. This one uses much period nomenclature, some of it Gaelic, and I was glad to have the Kindle dictionary to the ready. There is also much description of the kitchens, the corridors, and rooms, little of which relates to the crime. For the purposes of the plot we did not need to know that there were four or five kitchens, each with its own store rooms, etc., but told we are.
A few niggles about the plot remain, though I admit my speed page flicking may be the explanation. I never did figure out why Ann ‘Much-Described’ Boleyn risked so much on the spur of the moment and evidently convinced her paramour instantly to do the same almost. Nor was I sure what the point was of the torture and murder of the servant, while locking our hero in a box. Did the murderer of the doctor ever face punishment. Hard to tell.
A final plaint. Lawyer Mac Egan repeatedly praises Irish law in contrast to English law because it does not have capital punishment for murder, but rather extracts a financial penalty. We are given to understand three times, at least, that this is preferable to the barbaric English use of axe and noose. Is it? Does it not put a price on murder, one a rich man may be able and willing to pay? I am not arguing for capital punishment here but against the blanket preferment of the fine for murder. So that the rich can say, after torturing and killing, here are twenty cows.
To keep my niggles in proportion, I add that the book has very fine descriptions of wind, weather, water, and winter. That the characters are differentiated in speech and manner. That there is a mystery of two, though the pace is disjoined what with all the renditions of Boleyn’s charms, and people with a variety of characters from the time. And the time and place are made foreign and familiar. These are many and considerable accomplishments.

Cora Harrison has many other books.
I tried but could not engage with another period krimi from Tudor England before coming to this one. Thomas More is present in the books, and that was why I decided to read one though in these pages he mentioned only one in a list of worthies. Reading this book was an overdue anecdote to Hilary Mantle’s incomprehensible soup that so many claim to like, although I am delighted to see that more than 7000 GoodReaders gave it one star or less, and said the obvious.

‘Murder at Hampton Court’ (1931) by Edith M. Keate

Good Reads meta-data is 289 pages rated 3.0 by five litizens
Genre: Krimi, puzzle
Hampton Court cover.jpg
Verdict: borderline boring.
Among the aged retainers residing by grace and favour at Hampton Court Palace is old General Hamilton (Ret.) who goes each night to sit by the River Thames and recall the glory days. For reasons never explained he carries a chair with him each night and it is several times mentioned but plays no part in the proceedings. He is good humoured and much liked, living with his sprightly niece who is also well liked.
The equally aged staff, doormen, gardeners, maids, and night-watchmen, are sure there is a ghost in the grounds and this spectre is much invoked but plays no part in the plot. It is fabled the ghost is Samuel Pepys clad in a garish jackanapes coat. There are several references to Pepys but again they are sidebars without advancing the plot. The general’s niece has a colourful coat that provides the mystery.
One night the general is stabbed to death and all are agog. Strangely none of the elderly residents fears that they will be next, though that would surely be the reaction of some among such a group. Instead the protagonists, led by Annabel Sinclair, Lady-in-Waiting (Ret.), leap to the conclusion that — because of the coat — plod will focus on the niece who is completely innocent and to shield her the bulk of the novel consists of a three-ply tissue of lies to mislead the police inspector Margetson.
Quite how the inspector is to solve the crime when everyone lies to him is anyone’s guess. But this is not his first case and he expects lies and works through them with a patience that this reader did not have as I flicked the pages. Indeed he does not solve it, but after 280 pages of lies, the elderly villain commits suicide and leaves and explanatory note.
The setting is unique and fully exploited but because the characterisations are paper-thin and there is no action it hardly matters.
It reads like a puzzle krimi, providing the reader with all the clues to figure out the plot. The acme of this type is certainly Agatha Christie’s ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ (1926). Any hardened krimi reader will figure it out well before page 280, but the prose limps on.
Hampton Court Palace (1515+ ) has a long history as a grace and favour residence. (The last resident admitted by this means was in 1980, says Sarah Parker in ‘Grace & Favour: The Hampton Court Palace Community 1750-1950’ (2005), p. 126. Those in residence remained until 2009 when the last left. Grace and favour is extended by the monarch to those who have rendered past services, and include widows and dependents of such servants. Military officers and court officials (including retired ladies in waiting) are among those so favoured. By the way, none of this is explained in the novel, but derives from Wikipedia.
Edith Keate (1867-1945) was a civil servant who researched and wrote a ‘Guide to Hampton Court Palace’ and other official works about public places.
Hampton Court guide.jpg
She penned five other krimis but one is enough for me for the moment. It has been re-issued in the Black Heath Classic Crime series rendered for Kindle. It seem odd that Cardinal Wolsey who built it is never mentioned.
By the way she is E. M. Keate though the Amazon listing has her as M. E. Keate.