The Men in her Death: A Tessa Crichton Mystery

By Anne Morice

'I'm assuming that you want to see a murderer caught and getting what he deserves?'

'You bet I do. In fact, I hope he gets worse than he deserves.'

When a young American girl disappears from her flat and usual London haunts, her friends and family aren't frantically worried. She is over twenty-one, of independent sp

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean Street Press
• Release date: Jul 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781914150203

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

Lorraine’s first cable came through from Washington at about ten o’clock one Wednesday morning, when I was on the point of setting forth on an expedition to Soho. The operator who read it out to me asked if I wanted a copy in the post, but I said it would not be necessary. The message was quite simple, consisting of less than a dozen words, which were as follows: ‘WHAT ARE YOU AND ROBIN DOING NEXT WEEKEND QUERY LOVE LORRAINE.’

I had an appointment with my agent, to pick up a little gossip, and also a television script she was keen for me to read, so without giving much thought to it, or taking into account Lorraine’s fatal gift for creating mayhem and disruption in the lives of her many devoted friends, I shot back a reply, saying:

‘HAVING YOU AND HENRY TO STAY STOP WHY ASK QUERY LOVE TESSA.’

Her response to this arrived the next day and stated:

‘ARRIVING SATURDAY COMMA ON MY OWN STOP LOVE LORRAINE.’

Since she had included no details of her flight and, to judge on past form, could easily be intending to travel via Paris or the Canary Islands, Robin and I took it in turns to go about our business, fearing to be away from home at the very moment which marked the arrival either of our guest in person, or else another cable cancelling the visit, and it says much for her charm and winning ways that he bore up remarkably well under this ordeal. The working hours of a Detective Inspector are flexible, to put it mildly, and a whole Saturday morning off duty was not by any means a thing to be counted on. He had certainly planned to spend this one on slightly more adventurous activities than skulking about indoors, listening for the doorbell and telephone. I was able to point out that this was at least preferable to skulking about in Terminal Three, listening for the next tannoy announcement concerning the late arrival of the flight from Washington and, in fact, things could have turned out a lot worse, because on the stroke of twelve she bounded in, all smiles and loaded down by three overcoats and approximately one hundredweight of luggage.

Pausing only to dispose of all but two of these items in the spare room, one being the lowest layer of overcoat and the other a suitcase filled with presents for Robin and myself, whose wrappings alone made the eyes pop, she next commanded us to name the restaurant of our choice, as she was dying of hunger and proposed to take us out to lunch.

We did not bother with the conventional, polite protestations, nor suggest that she would be more sensible to fight off her jet lag by spending a few hours in bed, since we knew that this would be a waste of time. It would take more than a jet to make Lorraine’s vitality lag and, on the evidence of the luggage and coats, it was safe to assume that there was unlikely to be a restaurant, even in London, which would overstrain her financial resources.

‘And now tell us what this trip is all about, apart from the pleasure of our company?’ I said, when the prolonged and exhaustive study of the menu had been completed. ‘I hope you haven’t walked out on Henry?’

Lorraine at this time was in her early forties, tall, dark, handsome and a good deal slimmer and tidier looking than when I had last seen her, with wide set brown eyes, a heart as big as the Atlantic and a wide mouth which turned up at the corners when she smiled. She had pursued a number of careers in her time, most of them chequered, and acquired and lost a number of husbands of varying degrees of awfulness, before sailing into the highly respectable and plushy haven of her marriage to Henry Thurloe. There was nothing in the least awful about Henry, who was a successful lawyer from a grand New England family, good looking, good tempered and in all respects the kind of husband every right thinking American female would dream about. Fortunately, there appeared to be nothing wrong with Lorraine’s thinking on that subject, for she said:

‘Are you crazy? Henry’s the best thing that ever happened to me. In fact, it’s entirely on his account that you’re stuck with me.’

‘Why? Has he seen something in Sotheby’s catalogue that he wants you to bid for?’

‘Don’t be daft!’ Robin said. ‘You can bet your life he has experts in every capital in Europe to do that kind of job for him. Besides, who in the world would trust it to Lorraine? God knows what assortment she might arrive home with.’

‘So what is the purpose of this visit, Lorraine? Or is it a secret?’

‘You’re darn right it’s a secret. That’s why I had to send you the coded telegram.’

‘Oh, was it in code? I hadn’t realised.’

‘Well no, not entirely. I really did want to see you both and then Henry got this bright idea that I would do his sister-in-law, Elaine, the great big undeserved favour of going to London to try and sort things out for her. Only I couldn’t explain all that in a cable, in case the Arkville Bugle and Clarion got to hear about it.’

‘I begin to wonder whether it would have made things any clearer if you hadn’t used the code. The muckrakers of the Bugle and Clarion might have a field day with this story, but I still have some way to go before I catch up with them.’

‘Then let her tell it in her own way,’ Robin advised me. ‘It’s our only hope.’

‘Putting it my way,’ Lorraine said, ‘three weeks ago Elaine’s daughter, known to her friends as Sandy . . .’

‘What do her enemies call her?’ I asked, getting a warning look from Robin.

‘Her mother, who is about the worst enemy she has, calls her Alix. She was named Alexandra, for her father, and I expect Elaine thought the Alix bit would fool everyone into thinking there was some royal blood around. But the kids at school thought that was a boy’s name, so they changed it to Sandy and it’s stuck. Want to hear some more?’

‘Well, there must be more to the story than that, surely?’

‘There is. Three weeks ago Sandy disappeared down a hole in London and no one saw her come up again. I am here to make some discreet enquiries and, if necessary, to chloroform her and take her home to Arkville.’

‘Oh, splendid, Lorraine! What you might call the classic Jamesian situation! And just that piquant, updating touch of aunt and niece replacing uncle and nephew. You’ll have to watch out that you don’t get caught in the toils of some shady and impoverished baronet.’

‘Which hole did she disappear down?’ Robin asked, bringing us back to the factual level.

‘The one leading to the subway trains. Holland Park it’s called. You know it?’

‘Not intimately.’

‘She plunged into it three weeks ago and hasn’t been seen since.’

‘Who saw her go?’

‘Flat mate. Girl called Jocelyn Hunt. They’d been to the theatre and it was around ten-thirty, eleven, when they came out. Jocelyn was going on to some party only a block or two away, but Sandy opted to go straight home, so that’s where they separated. Never to meet again.’

‘Is Jocelyn