Elizabeth Ferrars and a picture of the 1970s

 Last Will and Testament by Elizabeth Ferrars

 published 1978

One of the reasons I enjoyed this book is that it gives a snapshot of some aspects of British life in its era, a time I remember well, small items but telling. One was just for me: a bottle of Alliage perfume features – forever in my mind as the item I bought myself after being interviewed for my first real job (you can still find it, and I recently did, but it is not part of the main Estee Lauder range). Standing in a department store the hot summer of graduating, I had a young person’s uncertain hope that the world ahead of me would be interesting and exciting, and would require a more expensive and less teenaged scent than I had used to date. It was a good choice: light and green and summery.

Other, less glamorous, items in the book include cheque books and bank cards, buying two chops, a cauliflower and a bottle of whisky for dinner, making sandwiches from tinned ham, and the heroine/narrator ‘changing into a long dress’ to go out to dinner at the local pub. ‘Not because there was any need for formality at the Rose and Crown, but because I wanted to feel as different as possible from how I had felt all day.’

There are a good few Elizabeth Ferrars books on the blog – she wrote a lot, over a long period of time – and if you want to see even more, Kate over at Cross-Examining Crime has featured many of them. Kate cross-examines this particular book, and the central relationship, very well in this post.

I tend to prefer Ferrars’ earlier books, but this is a good one: it introduces Virginia and Felix, who become series characters. They are a couple who are still technically married but very much not together. He’s a doubtful character with much charm and few morals. This book lays out what will become a regular trope: he turns up to see Virginia and trouble comes too, as night follows day, and the two of them investigate in an amateurish and lackadaisical way. Sometimes this just gets annoying, but sometimes it works a treat, and I would say this book comes into the good category.

An older lady has died – an old friend of Virginia’s, the mother of a schoolfriend. It is, btw, never suggested that she has been murdered, whatever you might be expecting. Shenanigans about the will follow (the clue is in the title), ending up in several murders. There is the usual useful collection of randoms involved. An older niece and nephew, a younger great-nephew, a companion called Meg, and the couple who were live-in servants, the Bodwells. There is a valuable collection of miniatures at stake. And there is also the solicitor, Patrick, who charms women and wears exuberant shirts, and appears to have little idea about client confidentiality and conflict of interest. He also (this is all not a spoiler, without relevance to his role as possible suspect) doesn’t seem really to be on point with the rules governing wills? My knowledge is of course learned mostly from detective stories, but I think he is wrong on a key point. (May need Bill Selnes from  the Mysteries and More blog to adjudicate: he is my goto legal expert, as well as coming in with clothes advice in my last post).

The book has some enjoyable moments. As the money/bequest/inheritance dramas emerge, Virginia thinks:

It is surprising how easy it is  not to feel worried by the prospect of the financial disappointment of other people.

We have a character wearing a green trousersuit

See this post for my comments on what the phrase means, then and now.

There are some nice discussions, to his face, of Felix’s moral code, or lack of:

‘After all, we all know what you’re like and the sort of life you led her.’ He drank some of his wine. ‘No offence.’

Felix claims to have ‘done a fair amount of voluntary work’ among reformed prisoners. Virginia thinks to herself ‘the only voluntary work that Felix had ever done among the criminal classes had consisted of drinking with them in pubs.’

And there is a splendid scene where innocent naïve Meg, the companion, has been listening to unreliable Felix recount his travellers’ tales, and blames Virginia for the breakup of their marriage: ‘If I’d been you I’d have gone with him… that trip on skis across the Greenland ice-cap.’

There is a storm and a tree falls down, with implications for the positioning of people’s cars – I always enjoy this: it’s a feature of Christianna Brand’s The Rose in Darkness.

Virginia says to Felix that he is ‘My poor old skeleton in search of a cupboard to hide in.’ Ferrars understandably seems to have been pleased with the phrase: She wrote a book four years later with the title Skeleton in Search of a Cupboard.

In the top picture, they all look far too cheery (and young) for the post-death gatherings in the book, but I loved the 1970s-ness of it, and Patrick did wear flowery and brightly-coloured shirts. And you cannot fault Ferrars for her endless descriptions of food (all of it very much of its time), communal eating, shopping, concern if any meal is late...

Group picture Vivat Vintage

Gold dress Vivat Vintage