They found him Dead Georgette Heyer

They Found Him Dead   Georgette Heyer

 

published 1937

This is an up and down kind of book. There are some excellent moments and characters and funny scenes here, but I didn’t find the mystery either compelling or difficult to solve. It was quite awkwardly written: I looked up her list of works and this is bang in the middle, she’d been going for ages, but this one did seem like it needed one more edit. There are weird transitions – including conversations that change personnel while underway… [I was going to include an example here, but it is quite dull. Can be produced as evidence if ever needed] so you have to re-read a few sentences several times. Someone gets engaged during the course of the book, and again you have to re-read three times to check what has happened – was there a scene missed out?

 

But Heyer’s crime books are always an easy enough read,  although the authorial voice can be over-opinionated and annoying. (For me, her best by a long way is Envious Casca, in fact one of my favourite crime books from any author, now re-published under various different names).

Heyer is very good at writing annoying but recognizable types: here are two competing women:

‘Doesn’t it get on your nerves? But perhaps you don’t suffer from your nerves as I do.’

It was not to be expected that Betty Premble would allow such an insulting suggestion to pass unchallenged, and she replied warmly that, as a matter of fact, she was One Mass of Nerves.

I had a sneaking soft spot for Rosemary, the first woman above, who was a very early adopter of Strengths-based leadership – when asked to do something difficult: ‘I’ve told you often and often that it’s just no use expecting me to do things like that. I’m not that sort.’

She is told off by the Heyer-classic-sharp-old-lady-character, who says that if bereaved, Rosemary would

 ‘spend a 12-month telling everyone what your emotions were.’

Rosemary took this in very good part, merely saying with a certain amount of interest, ‘I wonder if I should? Do you think I analyse myself too much? With my type that’s always a danger of course.’

Miss Allison felt that Rosemary came off the best from this encounter.

I think we’d all feel the same.

Rosemary gets her comeuppance late on

Lady Harte raised her eyes from the cards. ‘I do not in the least mind being thought insensitive, Rosemary; but as I fancy you meant that remark as a slur on my character, I can only say that it was extremely rude of you,’ she said severely. This rejoinder was so unexpected that Rosemary, colouring hotly, was for the moment bereft of speech. Lady Harte, laying her cards out with a firm hand, took advantage of her silence to add: ‘The sensitiveness you vaunt so incessantly, my good girl, does not seem to take other people’s feelings into account. If you talked less about yourself and thought more of others, you would not only be a happier woman, but a great deal pleasanter to live with into the bargain.’

But Rosemary doesn’t stay down for long, and is happy to get going again…

‘Undeterred by her oft-stated conviction that X had murdered Y, she at once accepted this invitation’ from the allegedly murderous household.

And: 'Rosemary, aware that a highly dramatic and possibly violent scene lay before her, armed herself for it by putting on a dove-grey hat and an appealing picture-hat.' 

One excellent feature of Heyer crime novels is that that poshos don’t waste any time being loyal to each other, or saying it couldn’t be one of their own type who did it – they are all very busy dobbing each other in, and suggesting motives for their nearest and dearest to have committed the crime.

‘I simply hate having to tell you this [CiB: no she doesn’t], but I do feel it’s my duty not to keep anything back. And actually it’s no secret that his great-aunt hated Clement. Everyone knows that James Kane is the one she’d like to have here.’

Yes, that’s Rosemary again.

I have noticed this before – this from a post on Heyer’s Detection Unlimited

I loved the way all the gentry in the village are forever telling the police whom they suspect did it, with full details – it makes a refreshing change from the usual solidarity, stiff upper lip and refusal to talk, and they are all completely horrible and unabashed about it. No blaming it on the servants or yokels: they all know perfectly well that one of their group must be guilty, and they are all keen to point the finger at each other.

There is an odd fashion reference: the sainted Rosemary at one point is imagining herself ‘the victim of a tragic love-affair, gowned by Reville, wearing a long mournful rope of pearls.’

Reville was a company founded in 1906, famous for court-dresses and robes, and actually responsible for Queen Mary’s coronation robe. According to the Vintage Fashion Guild ‘They were known for their lavish, but conservative, gowns and during the 1920s were not able to keep up with the changing tide of fashion. By the mid 1930s Reville was out of business.’ This book is 1937 – an unusual mistake for Heyer to make. I found a beautiful picture of a Reville gown at the National Portrait Gallery, but it is not available for reproduction without paying. However you can go and look at it here.

There is a lot about child-raising, with a couple of horrible children featured, but this is dull and predictable and irrelevant. However an excuse to show this:

Betty Pemble had been inspired to array her offspring in their best clothes, undeterred by any consideration of the unsuitability of jade-green silk for garden wear. Peter, who was a strong-minded-looking child of three, wore in addition to his jade knickers a frilled shirt of primrose yellow. yellow. Judging from his expression, which was forbidding, he did not regard his gala raiment with favour.

Illos for patterns for children’s clothes from 1937, NYPL

Top photo from the Smithsonian – it had a general feel for the people in the book, but also shows a woman anthropologist from the right date, Frederica Annis Lopez de Leo de Laguna, who travelled abroad for her researches and reminded me of Norma in the book, ‘who had developed in her 30s a passion for penetrating into the more inaccessible parts of the world’ and turns up late in the book to cause some trouble.