Murder in Married Life: A Tessa Crichton Mystery

By Anne Morice

'Stabbed?' she repeated, in horror. 'Was he really?'

'I'm afraid so. From behind. He was sitting at his desk.'

The soignée actress Tessa Crichton would rather be shopping and generally luxuriating in the pleasure of being newly married. However, she is soon embroiled in a plot involving an old acquaintance (murdered

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean Street Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913527945

Anne Morice

Anne Morice, née Felicity Shaw, was born in Kent in 1916.Her mother Muriel Rose was the natural daughter of Rebecca Gould and Charles Morice. Muriel Rose married a Kentish doctor, and they had a daughter, Elizabeth. Muriel Rose's three later daughters-Angela, Felicity and Yvonne-were fathered by playwright Frederick Lonsdale.Felicity's older sister Angela became an actress, married actor and theatrical agent Robin Fox, and produced England's Fox acting dynasty, including her sons Edward and James and grandchildren Laurence, Jack, Emilia and Freddie.Felicity went to work in the office of the GPO Film Unit. There Felicity met and married documentarian Alexander Shaw. They had three children and lived in various countries.Felicity wrote two well-received novels in the 1950's, but did not publish again until successfully launching her Tessa Crichton mystery series in 1970, buying a house in Hambleden, near Henley-on-Thames, on the proceeds. Her last novel was published a year after her death at the age of seventy-three on May 18th, 1989.

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Introduction

By 1970 the Golden Age of detective fiction, which had dawned in splendor a half-century earlier in 1920, seemingly had sunk into shadow like the sun at eventide. There were still a few old bodies from those early, glittering days who practiced the fine art of finely clued murder, to be sure, but in most cases the hands of those murderously talented individuals were growing increasingly infirm. Queen of Crime Agatha Christie, now eighty years old, retained her bestselling status around the world, but surely no one could have deluded herself into thinking that the novel Passenger to Frankfurt, the author’s 1970 Christie for Christmas (which publishers for want of a better word dubbed an Extravaganza) was prime Christie—or, indeed, anything remotely close to it. Similarly, two other old crime masters, Americans John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen (comparative striplings in their sixties), both published detective novels that year, but both books were notably weak efforts on their parts. Agatha Christie’s American counterpart in terms of work productivity and worldwide sales, Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, published nothing at all that year, having passed away in March at the age of eighty. Admittedly such old-timers as Rex Stout, Ngaio Marsh, Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell were still playing the game with some of their old élan, but in truth their glory days had fallen behind them as well. Others, like Margery Allingham and John Street, had died within the last few years or, like Anthony Gilbert, Nicholas Blake, Leo Bruce and Christopher Bush, soon would expire or become debilitated. Decidedly in 1970—a year which saw the trials of the Manson family and the Chicago Seven, assorted bombings, kidnappings and plane hijackings by such terroristic entities as the Weathermen, the Red Army, the PLO and the FLQ, the American invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State shootings and the drug overdose deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin—leisure readers now more than ever stood in need of the intelligent escapism which classic crime fiction provided. Yet the old order in crime fiction, like that in world politics and society, seemed irrevocably to be washing away in a bloody tide of violent anarchy and all round uncouthness.

Or was it? Old values have a way of persisting. Even as the generation which produced the glorious detective fiction of the Golden Age finally began exiting the crime scene, a new generation of younger puzzle adepts had arisen, not to take the esteemed places of their elders, but to contribute their own worthy efforts to the rarefied field of fair play murder. Among these writers were P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Emma Lathen, Patricia Moyes, H.R.F. Keating, Catherine Aird, Joyce Porter, Margaret Yorke, Elizabeth Lemarchand, Reginald Hill, Peter Lovesey and the author whom you are perusing now, Anne Morice (1916-1989). Morice, who like Yorke, Lovesey and Hill debuted as a mystery writer in 1970, was lavishly welcomed by critics in the United Kingdom (she was not published in the United States until 1974) upon the publication of her first mystery, Death in the Grand Manor, which suggestively and anachronistically was subtitled not an extravaganza, but a novel of detection. Fittingly the book was lauded by no less than seemingly permanently retired Golden Age stalwarts Edmund Crispin and Francis Iles (aka Anthony Berkeley Cox). Crispin deemed Morice’s debut puzzler a charming whodunit . . . full of unforced buoyance and prescribed it as a remedy for existentialist gloom, while Iles, who would pass away at the age of seventy-seven less than six months after penning his review, found the novel a most attractive lightweight, adding enthusiastically: [E]ntertainingly written, it provides a modern version of the classical type of detective story. I was much taken with the cheerful young narrator . . . and I think most readers will feel the same way. Warmly recommended. Similarly, Maurice Richardson, who, although not a crime writer, had reviewed crime fiction for decades at the London Observer, lavished praise upon Morice’s maiden mystery: Entrancingly fresh and lively whodunit. . . . Excellent dialogue. . . . Much superior to the average effort to lighten the detective story.

With such a critical sendoff, it is no surprise that Anne Morice’s crime fiction took flight on the wings of its bracing mirth. Over the next two decades twenty-five Anne Morice mysteries were published (the last of them posthumously), at the rate of one or two year. Twenty-three of these concerned the investigations of Tessa Crichton, a charming young actress who always manages to cross paths with murder, while two, written at the end of her career, detail cases of Detective Superintendent Tubby Wiseman. In 1976 Morice along with Margaret Yorke was chosen to become a member of Britain’s prestigious Detection Club, preceding Ruth Rendell by a year, while in the 1980s her books were included in Bantam’s superlative paperback Murder Most British series, which included luminaries from both present and past like Rendell, Yorke, Margery Allingham, Patricia Wentworth, Christianna Brand, Elizabeth Ferrars, Catherine Aird, Margaret Erskine, Marian Babson, Dorothy Simpson, June Thomson and last, but most certainly not least, the Queen of Crime herself, Agatha Christie. In 1974, when Morice’s fifth Tessa Crichton detective novel, Death of a Dutiful Daughter, was picked up in the United States, the author’s work again was received with acclaim, with reviewers emphasizing the author’s cozy traditionalism (though the term cozy had not then come into common use in reference to traditional English and American mysteries). In his notice of Morice’s Death of a Wedding Guest (1976), Newgate Callendar (aka classical music critic Harold C. Schoenberg), Seventies crime fiction reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, observed that Morice is a traditionalist, and she has no surprises [in terms of subject matter] in her latest book. What she does have, as always, is a bright and amusing style . . . [and] a general air of sophisticated writing. Perhaps a couple of reviews from Middle America—where intense Anglophilia, the dogmatic pronouncements of Raymond Chandler and Edmund Wilson notwithstanding, still ran rampant among mystery readers—best indicate the cozy criminal appeal of Anne Morice:

Anne Morice . . . acquired me as a fan when I read her Death and the Dutiful Daughter. In this new novel, she did not disappoint me. The same appealing female detective, Tessa Crichton, solves the mysteries on her own, which is surprising in view of the fact that Tessa is actually not a detective, but a film actress. Tessa just seems to be at places where a murder occurs, and at the most unlikely places at that . . . this time at a garden fete on the estate of a millionaire tycoon. . . . The plot is well constructed; I must confess that I, like the police, had my suspect all picked out too. I was dead wrong (if you will excuse the expression) because my suspect was also murdered before not too many pages turned. . . . This is not a blood-curdling, chilling mystery; it is amusing and light, but Miss Morice writes in a polished and intelligent manner, providing pleasure and entertainment. (Rose Levine Isaacson, review of Death of a Heavenly Twin, Jackson Mississippi Clarion-Ledger, 18 August 1974)

I like English mysteries because the victims are always rotten people who deserve to die. Anne Morice, like Ngaio Marsh et al., writes tongue in cheek but with great care. It is always a joy to read English at its glorious best. (Sally Edwards, Ever-So British, This Tale, review of Killing with Kindness, Charlotte North Carolina Observer, 10 April 1975)

While it is true that Anne Morice’s mysteries most frequently take place at country villages and estates, surely the quintessence of modern cozy mystery settings, there is a pleasing tartness to Tessa’s narration and the brittle, epigrammatic dialogue which reminds me of the Golden Age Crime Queens (particularly Ngaio Marsh) and, to part from mystery for a moment, English playwright Noel Coward. Morice’s books may be cozy but they most certainly are not cloying, nor are the sentiments which the characters express invariably traditional. The author avoids any traces of soppiness or sentimentality and has a knack for clever turns of phrase which is characteristic of the bright young things of the Twenties and Thirties, the decades of her own youth. Sackcloth and ashes would have been overdressing for the mood I had sunk into by then, Tessa reflects at one point in the novel Death in the Grand Manor. Never fear, however: nothing, not even the odd murder or two, keeps Tessa down in the dumps for long; and invariably she finds herself back on the trail of murder most foul, to the consternation of her handsome, debonair husband, Inspector Robin Price of Scotland Yard (whom she meets in the first novel in the series and has married by the second), and the exasperation of her amusingly eccentric and indolent playwright cousin, Toby Crichton, both of whom feature in almost all of the Tessa Crichton novels. Murder may not lastingly mar Tessa’s equanimity, but she certainly takes her detection seriously.

Three decades now having passed since Anne Morice’s crime novels were in print, fans of British mystery in both its classic and cozy forms should derive much pleasure in discovering (or rediscovering) her work in these new Dean Street Press editions and thereby passing time once again in that pleasant fictional English world where death affords us not emotional disturbance and distress but enjoyable and intelligent diversion.

Curtis Evans

One

(i)

Having forsaken all others, in a manner of speaking, in order to cleave only unto one Robin Price of the Dedley C.I.D., I had resigned myself to a life of obscurity and domestic bliss in our picturesque and damp little cottage at Storhampton-on-Thames. However, one year of marriage had taught us both that there is more than one way of achieving domestic bliss, and the claims of a double income and two separate careers are not to be lightly tossed aside.

Among those whom I had not totally forsaken was an Anglo-American film company, in one of whose productions I had once figured in a modest way, and I believe that Robin and I were about equally relieved when they offered me a three-year contract at a far from modest salary. It is true that having tied me up to their own satisfaction they promptly lost all interest in the transaction, but the salary, less ten per cent agent’s commission, was paid regularly into my bank account at the precise period of our lives when hard cash was the most pressing need.

It had happened that at almost the identical time when I was signing on the dotted line Robin had received his own step up in the world, in the form of promotion to the Metropolitan Branch; and our new affluence enabled us to begin life in Beacon Square, S.W.1, in the style to which we were both so eager to become accustomed.

It was not the most fruitful and creative stage in my career, but at least the enforced idleness gave me plenty of time for self-indulgent shopping expeditions in search of furnishings for our pretty new house, so I did not complain more than a dozen times a day. Moreover, without it, I might never have taken a hand in the real life drama of Mr B, the vanishing book carrier, and the capricious behaviour of the telephone. Who can say how far the course of justice might then have gone astray, or, more to the point, who would now be here to tell the tale?

(ii)

One store which became a favourite hunting ground was called Thurgoods. It lay between Soho and Piccadilly Circus and combined a variety of moods and merchandise under one roof.

The ground floor, mysteriously known as the Boutique, was a glorious hotch-potch of Thai silk, trendy modern furniture, Indian jewellery and Italian straw bags; and to this extent, I suppose, offered no more than a dozen other shops in that part of London. However, these were only a sample of the wonders to be found within. On the first floor was a separate department dealing exclusively in second-hand furniture and bric-a-brac. Three-quarters of the customers who swarmed into the ground floor never entered the treasure trove above. Whereas a lift just inside the main door enabled the collector and connoisseur to whisk himself straight to the upper haunts, without so much as a glimpse of all the gimmickries down below.

I was among the few who patronised both departments, though my first-floor visits were primarily of a social character, since an old family friend, Betty Haverstock, had recently been put in charge of it. It was from her that I first learnt of the existence of even more rarefied premises on the floor above that.

Betty’s expert knowledge of antiques had been acquired in the natural course of things, through a series of marriages into families whose town and country houses were bulging with the stuff. Beginning this rewarding career in a run-down Irish manor house, she had landed up, ten years and three husbands later, on a sizeable chunk of Caribbean coastline. On this site Betty had constructed a pleasure dome of great magnificence, and the story went that, one morning, an American millionaire had turned up on the doorstep and asked to be shown around. He became so enraptured with the place that he could hardly tear himself away, and was invited to stay for lunch. Two hours later, over coffee and cognac in the Italian pavilion, the property changed hands, and a week later the new owner took possession. History did not relate whether the husband had been thrown in along with the rest of the contents, but Betty had returned to London alone, and with no visible signs of affluence to show for her pains.

She had taken her job with Thurgoods in order to put her vast experience to profitable account, and also, presumably, while waiting for husband number five.

In spite of my regular visits, I rarely succeeded in buying anything on the first floor, for Betty had a forceful character whose full forcefulness was normally fixed on preventing my doing so. However, one morning she did an about-turn and brought out all her big guns on behalf of a spindly little book carrier, for which I had no use whatever.

‘Don’t be an idiot, Tessa,’ she said impatiently. ‘It’s genuine eighteenth century and in perfect condition. Only thirty-five guineas, and I guarantee it would fetch twice that at auction.’

‘But I hardly ever carry books around,’ I protested. ‘And, if I did, I should think a plastic bag would be much more practical.’

‘Don’t be so ignorant. It’s a sort of portable shelf. You could put the telephone directories in it, if you wanted to be terribly vulgar. You’d be entitled to a free drink, if you bought it,’ she added, looking at her watch.

‘I should think I’d be entitled to free psycho-analysis. Do you keep a bottle in the staff cloakroom?’

‘No, but there’s plenty upstairs. Haven’t you ever seen the Boardroom?’

‘Never, now you mention it.’

‘That shows what a rotten customer you are. Anyone who spends over twenty-five quid at one go is entitled to a free drink up there.’

‘What a fantastic idea! What’s the point of pouring all the profits down the customers’ throats?’

‘Don’t be fooled. Half the customers are like you; terribly timid and suspicious. They think there must be a catch, and nothing will get them near the place. The other half buys a mass of things they can’t afford, just because there’s a few bobs’ worth of free gin thrown in.’

‘I take it there’s also a contingent who make a habit of dropping in whenever they feel a thirst coming on?’

‘A few do,’ she admitted. ‘One, in particular; but they’re personal friends of the management. The barman has a most elaborate set of rules for keeping out the real gatecrashers.’

‘Don’t tell me they actually keep a barman?’

‘Well, not a real one, no, because it’s not a real job. He used to be a sort of family retainer, and they’ve more or less put him out to grass on the second floor. Of course, they do some of their private entertaining there, too, specially our Mr Arthur, but it’s really a sinecure. It’s one of the few endearing things one hears on the staff grapevine; the way they look after old Barnes, I mean. I think our Daddy Chairman must be at the bottom of it. He’s quite an old duck, when you get to know him.’

‘Not a widower, by any chance?’ I asked, scenting romance.

‘Don’t be crude, Tessa.’

‘Okay, but who’s Mr Arthur?’

‘Elder son. Pa is chairman and managing director. The younger son is called Mr Teddy, and he’s in charge of all that trash on the ground floor. Mrs Teddy does most of the work, but he’s nominally in charge. Anything else you’d like to know?’

‘No, thanks. It all sounds very cosy.’

Betty looked at me speculatively, then said: ‘That’s just the public image, I’m afraid. Behind the scenes they fight like cats and dogs. There’s a gigantic row boiling up at the moment, by all accounts, and I wouldn’t half mind finding out what it’s all about. In fact, that’s rather what I had you in mind for.’

‘Indeed? What was my role?’

‘I thought, if I took you up and introduced you to Mr Arthur, who’s always around at this hour, you might strike up a beautiful friendship. He’s a sucker for what he calls the dolly birds. You’d have him crying on your shoulder in no time.’

‘To what end?’ I inquired, not much attracted to this programme. ‘Don’t tell me you’re taking up blackmail, as a sideline?’

This feeble joke got an even frostier reception than it deserved, and to make amends I said heavily: ‘Okay, Betty, wrap the silly thing up and I’ll take it. What’s another thirty-five quid between friends?’

‘Guineas.’

‘Guineas, then; but, on second thoughts, can you send it? I’m on my way to a swanky lunch and it might look rather affected to march in with a book carrier in my hand.’

‘The van’s gone for today, but I could get it on to-morrow’s delivery.’

‘No hurry,’ I assured her.

‘Will there be someone to take it in?’

‘Bound to be.’

‘I mean someone reliable; not that silly creature who answers the telephone.’

‘No, Sandy will be there tomorrow. You could hardly get more reliable than that, could you?’

‘No, you couldn’t,’ Betty agreed, with conviction, and began making out the bill.

I handed her my cheque, which she scrutinised carefully, then waved me towards the lift. She followed me inside and pressed the top button. Curiously enough, I found myself growing steadily more timid and suspicious as we sailed up to the second floor.

(iii)

‘It was the full anti-climax, though, because we landed up in the most normal, uncreepy room imaginable,’ I admitted, when describing the incident at dinner, which was elegantly served to us by the so-called silly creature. This was a young man named Sebastian, who was rather more gainfully