Poison in the Pen by Patricia Wentworth

published 1955

[She] bought a very smart black autumn model suit with the new skirt and a most becoming shoulder line. She liked colours herself, and the brighter the better, but when all was said and done nothing set a fair girl off like black, and men fell for it every time. She could wear it at the inquest and at the funeral, and it would be just the thing for town. She supposed she had better have a hat – just a twist of something – and some veiling. A veil could be very becoming, only it mustn’t hide her hair.

She brought all the things home with her and tried them on again in her own room. Sometimes things were a ghastly disappointment when you did that, but these looked even better than they had in the shop. Good clothes gave you a pull when you were looking for a job, and with an off-white blouse and something in the lapel there wouldn’t be any need to look like a walking funeral.

observations: This is – a stock figure in a certain kind of murder story, Christie was good at these - the devastated widow of a much older man, trying to cope with her bereavement. She was about to be divorced from him and lose her cushy number, and she was plainly common, come up from the lower classes. Her grief is controllable. But – is she also a murderer and poison-pen-letter writer?

I’ve been looking at poison pen mysteries for Poison Pen week and a list, and this is pretty much the ur-text – a village, a lot of scandal, motives and possibilities for absolutely everyone, and annoying old bat Miss Silver come to investigate. The cover of this edition sums the book up beautifully:

Many Golden Age detective stories flag around the middle – this one is the opposite with a very good atmosphere of a central wedding that is about to go wrong (but exactly how?) and a lot of moodiness and flouncing. On the other hand, far too much time is spent proving to us that the various deaths are not accidental. In real life that might be necessary, but I think the readers have guessed already.

As in the recent Ashenden there is one of those characters who has a ‘thankless’, highly dangerous and secret job, meant to be some kind of spying or James Bondery. As in Moving Finger, there is a man who lives alone, and a character called Barton. The village is Tilling, as in some of the Mapp and Lucia books.

In any other kind of book the detective, Miss Silver, would be headed for a speedy death from TB, as she coughs all the time – what’s that about? I counted 13 occasions when she coughed, from a ‘faintly reproving’ one, through a ‘slightly reproving’ one to one that ‘conveyed the impression that she was being discreet.’

Also, we are given far too much information about what she is knitting. She gets through several garments during her visit, including this - 'I am making a twin set for my niece’s little girl. The jumper is finished. This is the cardigan.’ (The picture to the left is a pattern from the excellent Free Vintage Knitting site, should you want to make it.)

The book reminded me why I enjoy a Wentworth from time to time, but don’t seek them out. Robert Barnard, in his excellent book on Agatha Christie, says that one of the differences between the two writers is that there are always some characters in Wentworth who are automatically excluded from suspicion – basically the young lovers – and that this is most certainly not true of AC. Once this has been pointed out you realize what a good perception it is, and you can easily divide other writers according to this split.

More poison pen all over the blog at the moment, and you can click on the label below to see the entries.

The main picture is from the Dovima is divine phtotostream – I use this resource a lot, and a) am really grateful to Christine for the wonderful pictures and b) should point out again that the pictures are not all of the early supermodel Dovima, that is just the name of the collection.