Good Clues & Good Discussions: Who is Simon Warwick? By Paricia Moyes

 

There has been a delay in offering a new blogpost because the last one - on Jane Austen's Emma - produced such a remarkable discussion below the line that I wanted to let it run and run. More than 120 comments at time of writing, a blog record, and more contributions still welcome. Who would win in a fistfight between Robert Martin and George Wickham? How serious are Emma's mistakes? Does Mr Woodhouse have any redeeming features, and why are parents so awful in JA? And much much more... 

Everyone has strong opinions, but the remarkable thing is how friendly the chat is -  nobody gets mean about it. In current internet ways, this is truly remarkable. Thank you to all my readers

And now, finally, a new book:

Who is Simon Warwick? by Paricia Moyes

published 1978

My friend Jim over at the Invisible Event blog recently did a fascinating post about clues in Golden Age mysteries – I strongly recommend it. It includes a tour de force of showing different ways a writer could introduce the same clue: the white scarf.

It got me thinking about clues, and I mentioned in a comment to the post that one of the best I remembered came in a book that wasn’t otherwise very memorable. And this is it – I took it down off the shelf for a reread in the wake of Jim’s activity.

I have done a few Patricia Moyes books on the blog (see tag below), and have enjoyed some of them: they usually have interesting settings, and I can always get worked up about Henry Tibbett being very annoying and his wife Emmy a doormat -  full discussion here, and not challenged in this book by the way.

Who is Simon Warwick? has an excellent setup: a rich dying man – a lord and a businessman – decides to search for his lost heir, a nephew who was orphaned and adopted, the eponymous Simon. He wants to leave his fortune to him. The child was taken to the USA, and his name was changed, and the lord dies before he can be found.

So now two different claimants come forward – how to decide which is the right one? Impersonation! A great favourite round here.

So there is some investigating into the two men, and then – just as they are about to confront each other – one of them is murdered in a solicitor’s office on a Saturday morning. (A weird reminder of one aspect of Michael Gilbert’s Smallbone Deceased)

I should have enjoyed all this enormously, but my memory was that it didn’t quite work for me, and it was the same this time. (I will come on to the question of the Good Clue shortly.) I wasn’t invested in either of the two claimants, and could guess some of what was going on. It all became quite meta, regarding who might have a motive, depending on who was the real Simon Warwick, and then a rigmarole about arrests and arrivals from the USA and lost characters.

However: there was one aspect that I had completely forgotten and was not expecting at all. Plainly I can’t give this away, though with my patent  #spoilernotspoiler system there are similar plotlines in works by this author,

& this one

& this one

(not necessarily the book in the linked post, and all of them wrote shedloads of books, so you can triangulate or not as you choose)

It was a big surprise, and handled well I thought.

Now, when I started rereading, I had no real memory of anything except double-Simons, and the clue. When the clue turned up I was very surprised about who was involved, I would  not have remembered that at all. Because I was looking for it, the clue jumped out at me, but I truly believe most people would not spot it.

And that’s all I can say.

So – an interesting read, with some points of interest, but not recommending everyone rushes out to find it…

Sometimes Patricia Moyes gives good clothes, and sometimes she doesn’t. Not this time, so I have chosen a couple of women who resembled my idea of those in the book - particularly the respectable wives of various respectable men - from fashion magazines of the era.