Forgotten Book - Death and Mary Dazill

I have mixed feelings about Mary Fitt's crime fiction. Some of her books, such as Mizmaze, strike me as hopeless, but she was capable of writing very well. What is more, she had the ambition to stretch herself and try out different forms of storytelling. One of her better-known books, Death and Mary Dazill (1941) is a case in point. It's a sort of cold case mystery, with a historical crime investigated by her series characters Superintendent Mallett and Dr Fitzbown. But its great strength lies in the characterisation and atmosphere.

The story opens with Mallett and Fitzbown attending a colleague's funeral. They are struck by the sight of two elderly women carrying a wreath to someone else's grave. The vicar tells them that they are the de Boulter sisters, Lindisfarne and Arran (great names!) and they were connected with a sequence of deaths when they were on the cusp of adulthood.

Curiosity aroused, Mallett and Fitzbown want to find out what happened. The vicar's wife knows the story, because her mother Lucy was a close friend of 'Lindy' and Arran, as well as their brother Leonard and another young man called John. But their lives were torn apart when their widowed father brought into their home an attractive and seemingly demure young woman called Mary Dazill.

The story is told mainly in flashback, and on the whole I think Fitt handles a tricky structure very well indeed. The book is fairly short and although she wasn't the paciest of writers, I found it very readable. The ambiguities of the storyline weren't, to my mind, irritating, as they would be in a novel written by a less talented author. Every now and then we flip back to the present day, with Mallett operating in effect as an armchair detective. This is an unorthodox novel and as good as anything I've read from this interesting if variable author.