Reprint of the Year: Clues to Christabel

Reprint of the Year is now an important tradition in the world of Golden Age detective story fans. Every year - organized by our Queen and Social Secretary Kate Jackson - members of our informal group of enthusiasts each choose two books to blog on, which we are nominating for the title Reprint of the Year. Then, everyone gets the chance to vote on which is the best title 

For more details, head over to Kate's blog, Cross-Examining Crime.

 

This is my first choice:

Clues to Christabel by Mary Fitt

1944

 

“She thought she had influenza, and went to bed. But when she didn’t get better, we began to think it must be something else… it appeared that she had had a relapse of some kind, had gone to bed, and had died a fortnight later.”

 

I’ve read a couple of books by Mary Fitt prior to this one, and blogged on one: the 1936 Three Sisters Flew Home, which gave me a nice New Year party entry for the turn of 2019/2020. My reaction to all of them is similar: Fitt’s books have some incredibly annoying features (including an authorial voice that tells you exactly what to think about every single character) but a cheery line in good social interactions – and in the case of the NY party I was able to find some astonishing colour photos to illustrate, do check that out.

I also noted that Mary Fitt had the most affected author bio I had ever seen:

‘It was the vast and pleasant study of mankind that set my feet on the roads he had travelled and sent me to the places where he has resided…. And as Man is the measure of all things I have [studied] his philosophy, his poetry, the works of his hands – and his villainy.’

This edition has something more measured and helpful: an introduction and biographical note by Curtis Evans, as masterly as his contributions always are, with a lot of fascinating detail about her life.

So – finally – onto this book.

It’s a great setup: a suspicious death in the not-too-distant past. The titular Christabel was a hugely successful author in her 30s, surrounded by family and friends who are all fairly awful hangers-on. They ended up in a house together, squabbling and making their demands and worrying about the future. Then Christabel fell ill and died, and now we can all have a go at being concerned about her will, and about friends vs relatives, and we can all be excessively mean to each other again.

Into this squalid whirlpool comes, a year later, Dr George Cardew, who wants to find out what happened, in the usual crime-story fashion, but has come theoretically to help with the writing of a biography of Christabel, as he knew her from childhood. So there will be a lot of going through letters and diaries, and issues around who has rights and access to her papers. Everyone is being asked for their memories of the dead woman, and these will be the Clues to Christabel.

It’s an excellent starting point, and one that you could imagine Agatha Christie enjoying working with.

The two sides – friends and family – are in quite the face-off, rather unusual. The last volume of Christabel’s diary assumes a huge importance, and is lost, found and pinched several times over.

One odd thing is that the narrative starts with George telling his friends the story, but then keeps changing POV, which is a reasonable structure – but is done in a very jumpy and odd way, leaving the reader to work it out.

Christabel had what’s called in the book undulant fever, and the treatment and possible causes of this are important. It is slightly better-known as brucellosis, and could develop from unpasteurized milk, an issue that often features in books of the era.

The book can get somewhat grim - ‘her dark eyes smouldered with hatred as they met Marcia’s’ – but there are some entertaining moments: I enjoyed this cautious man

“I wanted to knock his block off,” said Harold, clenching his fist, “but he happened to be carrying a shot-gun at the time, and I wouldn’t have put it past him to have had an ‘accident.’ I don’t mean he would have killed me—that would have been too hard to explain away—but he could have emptied that gun into my shoes.”

And I liked this character describing herself – I think we’ve all come across this brittle sophisticated woman in crime books, and I chose this picture for her:

My family have forgotten how to make money these many long years, and if they did make any, they wouldn’t give it to me. Joe is a dear soul, but he has the mentality of a waiter, and not a head waiter at that.

A couple more odd facts: Fitt had a series police detective, by now Superintendent Mallett, which is the same name as a copper in Cyril Hare’s books…**

And the old lady in the house gets to drink a ‘sedative bouillon’. There are foil packets containing a sticky brown substance. ‘All you do is to pour boiling water on one of these, as if it were a meat cube.’ (I think all crime story fans are busy seeing endless possibilities here).

There are some other drugs in a ‘chippette box’. Now, it is very hard to look up chippette, because there was once a fictitious pop group called the Chipettes (one p, which I think the book version should be) – a spin-off from Alvin and the Chipmunks as you will I'm sure have guessed – who dominate the results. (I even tried searching on ‘material chipette’ but those pesky pop chipettes had done a cover of Madonna’s Material Girl…)

But eventually I found a reference to medicines being supplied in ‘chipette boxes made from twisted card stuck together’ – with a firm line that these are cheap and convenient but neither ‘serviceable nor hygienic’.  

Final verdict: this book is strangely constructed, but makes for very interesting reading, full of great details, and with an unexpected solution. Some might say that that solution comes out of nowhere, and that what detection there is, leads nowhere. In the end we are just told who did it. But I think Clues to Christabel transcends all those weirdnesses to make an atmospheric, intriguing and unusual book, one with some psychological depth, and is a forceful attempt to show realistic family problems.

I hereby nominate it for Reprint of the Year.

** other Malletts in literature: The Misses Mallett by EH Young, another New Year’s Eve party entry on the blog in 2023. And in Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love : ‘…you said she was a horrible Counter-Hon, and you would like to bash in her silly face with the Hons’ mallet.’

(Also of course a murder weapon in various crime stories - all with one t)

Woman in bed is from the State Library of Queensland

Woman in black from Clover Vintage