Planning for Murder: A Tubby Wiseman Mystery

By Anne Morice

It was unlikely that many had actually prayed for the murder of Mr Waddington, and they did not light beacons on the Downs or rejoice openly when it came about, but most had probably uttered a silent word of thanks.

There is no shortage of murderous feelings among the eccentric country folk opposed to the development of a new 'mod

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean Street Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781914150401

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

(1)

‘Things appear to have got into a bit of a mess since I last descended on you,’ Miranda Jones observed, casting a disapproving eye round her father’s studio on the Wednesday before Easter. ‘It’s lucky I decided to come for the whole week.’

Miranda, who was then in her second year at a London ballet school and shared a flat in Battersea with her friends, Lucy and Mark, spent most Saturday and Sunday nights, as well as the major part of her summer vacation, at East End House in West Sussex, where she had been born and, after a fashion, brought up. There were times, especially during the winter, when she would have chosen to be elsewhere, but she had a strong sense of responsibility as well as affection for her father, Billy Jones, who was an architect and on the reclusive side. And, to be absolutely honest, of late West Sussex offered other inducements for frequent visits, which for the time being Miranda chose to keep to herself.

Miranda’s somewhat exceptional filial attitude dated from her early childhood when her mother, discovering herself to be unfitted for marriage and motherhood and, most of all, Billy’s reclusiveness, had thrown in the towel and departed to take up residence with a woman friend in Provence. This domestic upheaval had made a lasting impression on Miranda. She had grown up to be a well-adjusted and self-reliant young person and, aware of these virtues herself, attributed them largely to never having needed to play off one parent against the other in order to gain the attention of both, and never having been ruled by the whims of an older and, she had reason to believe, sillier woman.

As a result, her main sense of responsibility towards her father lay in her determination to prevent his making the same mistake twice, for she had small faith in his judgement in such matters, allied to plenty in her own to recognise disaster when she saw it looming and to nip it in the bud.

‘I trust you are speaking metaphorically,’ he told her.

‘What does that mean?’

‘That I could bear it better if your purpose is to bully me about taking more exercise, getting my hair cut, paying the bills promptly and cutting down on alcohol. What I should find objectionable is any plan you may have for spring cleaning the house and tidying up all my possessions, so that I have to spend three weeks looking for them when you have gone.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ Miranda assured him, not yet ready to commit herself. In fact, her mission this time, with a whole week set aside for it, did not belong to either category, although closer to the first than the second. It had come to her ears that he had now got himself into a pickle of a different nature, to the point where even his staunch friend and powerful ally, Avril Meyer, was beginning to look askance, while in different circles words such as bribery and corruption were being freely bandied about.

Her informant in this, as in many other matters of local interest, was Martha Kershaw, another old friend of Billy’s and in many ways a more perceptive one. There was nothing at all powerful about Martha, who was a middle-aged spinster of small means, no looks, and very few opinions which she considered to be worth airing in public. For all these reasons she was largely ignored by members of West Sussex ‘society’, although not by Avril, who recognised her true worth and, compared with herself, intellectual superiority.

She was also popular with the younger generation, a fact which some of their parents found odd, if not incomprehensible, although to Martha herself the reason seemed plain enough. There was shrewdness in this, but no vanity for, as only a few days earlier she had attempted to explain to Avril, ‘I think they see me as one of the few survivors of a dying breed and therefore in need of protection.’

‘Oh, they do, do they? Personally, I’d always thought of you as the original ostrich. What breed do they consider yours to be?’

‘The maiden aunt, as portrayed in those Victorian novels some of them read in their teens. She was not always an agreeable woman, but she occupied a unique place in the family circle and they feel about me rather as they would if they discovered that Father Christmas really does come down the chimney with a sack of presents on Christmas Eve.’

‘Well, I expect you’re right, as usual, Martha. I’m afraid they’re more likely to see me as Lady Catherine de Burgh.’

‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised.’

‘Right, so now we’ve got that sorted out, let’s go back to what led up to it. You were saying you’d written to Miranda to ask her to get down off her points for a few days to see if she can find out what her old man’s up to and, if possible, put a stop to it.’

‘Not in those precise words. In fact, I’ve brought the letter with me for you to cast an eye over before I send it. You can give me your opinion.’

‘Oh, always ready with that, as you know. Let’s have a dekko.’

Martha had written as follows:

Dearest Miranda,

Such a lovely surprise to hear your voice on the telephone last night and good news that you plan to come down for Easter. I expect I sounded a bit gormless, but, as usual, only found the right words to express what was in my mind after you had rung off, so I will now try to explain.

Without wishing to cause you the slightest alarm, I do think it might be a good idea if you were to stay on for an extra day or two, as some of us are beginning to feel a tiny bit worried about your father. He’s not in the least unwell, I hasten to assure you. In fact, I’ve rarely seen him so active (what you would call ‘jumping about’) as he’s been for the past few weeks. In a funny way, that’s what I find the most worrying side of it because it’s so unlike him, you know, and I can’t help being afraid that all this enthusiasm for the job he’s now working on is going to blow up in his face.

To be as brief as possible, it concerns a huge development scheme, whereby Mr Waddington who, as you’ll remember, moved into Uppfield Court years ago when the old man died, means to use about four hundred acres of the land to create a sort of ‘new town’, complete with shopping precinct, sports centre and cinema.

As you may imagine, when this was first mooted none of us took it seriously. We’d always assumed in a vague sort of way that it was scheduled as agricultural land and that no local council would ever be empowered to grant building permission on anything like such a scale and ruin the environment for what strikes most people as such a totally unnecessary purpose.

However, it now turns out that, what with all the new Common Market rules and one thing and another, farming is not nearly such a profitable game as it used to be and landowners like Mr Waddington are having to cut down on their labour force and turn what used to be arable and cereal producing land into things like golf courses and camping sites, which I suppose is what you might describe as the thin end of the wedge. Of course, there’s bound to be a public outcry before they can push it through, but we hear that he is working hand in glove with some powerful great