Murder by Burial by Stanley Casson

Murder by Burial by Stanley Casson

published 1938

I came across this green and white Penguin in a second-hand bookshop in Bloomsbury in London, and was surprised I’d never heard of it. I thought it must be quite obscure, but when I googled it there was plenty online. Of particular note are items from two blogfriends: Martin Edwards’ blogpost here, and  Caroline Crompton’s Shedunnit episode on Agatha Christie and the Archaeologists, which you can find here Shedunnit - Agatha’s Archaeologists - BBC Sounds

Shedunnit always a favourite round here anyway, but this is a great edition, and she mentions Murder by Burial at the end, giving us an absolutely fascinating direct line between Stanley Casson and Agatha Christie – he was tutor to her 2^nd husband Max Mallowan, and indirectly is responsible for our favourite Golden Age couple meeting…

The book is an enjoyable oddity. It is completely steeped in the ways and morals of a Golden Age detective story – my favourite line comes from the young heroine:

Hilary gasped. “But surely,” she said, “decent men like X don’t behave like that!”

It also has a firm sense of place – both the village in East Anglia, and Little Britain in the City of London (the  description would apply today apart from the mention of lorries going to the Covent Garden market). The archaeology and history in the story are fascinating and informative: the author obviously had a great interest in the pre-Roman Britain, and was anxious that the state of the nation then should not be under-estimated. He also has a keen interest in the politics of 1938: there is a huge concern with fascist-style organizations, key to the plot, and Oswald Mosley is mentioned.

So it is a fascinating and enjoyable read with some very funny moments. I particularly liked the architect who KNEW he was making a mistake in his design for a ladies’ room, but took ages to realize what the problem was: the urinals he had put in the plans. And when one man says ‘creating a monument makes one feel like a verse from the Book of Genesis’

To which Hilary thinks ‘The Song of Songs is more in your line young man.’

-which does also tell you that you are never in doubt as to who are the nice and who the not-so-nice characters, and the book is tremendously snobbish.

The crime involves the death of a nice sympathetic character, in an apparent accident during the excavation. There is a diagram on p208 of my book which I thought unique in my GA reading.

So it is all good fun, but it has to be said that as a mystery there is nothing going on – no surprises or detecting, no closed circles or locked rooms, not even an inverted tale. Just – no mystery. The nearest thing to detection comes when one character parses another’s Who’s Who entry to draw conclusions about him. ‘Do you think [his] book called Wild Flowers of the Sierras is erotic or horticultural?’

 But a good read all the same. Casson was a serious archaeologist himself – perhaps one of those 30s specialists/academics who enjoyed a crime story and thought ‘I could do that’. This was his only book. If you see a copy it is worth picking up…

 

I have greatly enjoyed finding archaeological pictures for past entries, particularly those for Ellie Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway mysteries: it is one of those areas where there are plenty of pictures around, and I know where to look. Of course, any proper historian would probably tut at my choices, as I do not match them to the archaeology in the book under discussion. But in the spirit… so the top picture is an excavation in Sweden in 1928, the second one a different Swedish project, 1906.