Forgotten Book - The Detling Murders aka The Detling Secret

I first read Julian Symons' The Detling Murders not long after its original publication in 1982. It was the third of his Victorian mysteries, following the highly successful (and televised) The Blackheath Poisonings and the very interesting Sweet Adelaide. Both those novels drew heavily on real life nineteenth century murder cases, although they were very different from each other. The Detling Murders was different again - Symons strove not to repeat himself, hence his distaste for series characters - but I remember feeling rather underwhelmed. 

For one thing, if not for the title(which was changed for the US anyway), I'd have wondered if I really was reading a murder mystery. Murder doesn't occur until we are more than half way through the story, while the second killing takes place very near the end of the book. Symons himself felt dissatisfied with the book and decided to go back to writing contemporary mysteries.

On rereading the book, however, I was more impressed. This is partly because Symons' picture of upper class Victorian society is very entertaining in its own right. The Detlings are a fading branch of the landed gentry and Sir Arthur Detling, the head of the household, is almost a caricature of a crusty old reactionary. But the family dynamics are nicely portrayed. The starting point is the news that Dolly Detling wants to marry an up and coming Liberal MP, Bernard Ross, whose background is rather mysterious. Sir Arthur isn't happy, but the couple get their way.

As usual, Symons moves the story along over a period of time, shifting focus from one character to another, so that it's not clear where events are heading. There are some Fenian dynamiters lurking in the background and shady business dealings aplenty. Roderick Detling is a gambler who has run up debts, while Nelly Detling gets herself involved with a dodgy crowd of artists (allowing Symons to write yet another bohemian party scene - he really did like writing those). The plot is carefully constructed, and stronger than I appreciated on a first reading. And as ever with Symons, the book is extremely readable. It ends up with a Christmas family gathering in rural Kent - the sort of scenario which usually opens detective stories rather than closing them. In this part of the book, as earlier, there are some nice comic touches.

The main reason why this book isn't a complete success is, I think, that Symons didn't pay enough attention to the building of tension and suspense. He sets up a series of intriguing situations but there's not as much excitement as many readers expect and indeed demand. Nor is it clear (and this is a problem in quite a few of his books) which member of his ensemble cast of characters is the central protagonist. For me, Bernard Ross is clearly the central figure and I think the story might have worked better if the focus on him had been clearer and more unrelenting. I guess Symons feared that this would reduce the surprise element of his story, but there could have been ways round that challenge. As it is, the murders and their investigation seem more perfunctory than is desirable in a detective novel. So this is a minor Symons, but it's definitely good enough to justify a read. Or two. 

 

Forgotten Book - Dear Laura

The rise of the historical mystery can be dated to the 1970s (although some good examples were written much earlier). An especially strong Victorian crime story is Dear Laura by Jean Stubbs. So good, in fact, that it was nominated for an Edgar. It remains, I think, the outstanding achievement of a capable, Manchester-born author whose wrote a variety of books including a short series featuring the Victorian cop Inspector Lintott. She wrote some novels directly inspired by real life crimes, but this is a story of her own invention.

This is a Lintott novel, and he is called in following receipt of anonymous letters which suggest that Theodore Crozier, a Wimbledon businessman (he runs a toymaking business; I was slightly sorry not to hear more about this) whose death has been attributed to natural causes was in fact murdered. Hid body is exhumed, and sure enough it emerges that he was killed by a fatal dose of morphine.

We are presented with a classic emotional triangle. Crozier was a cold man, and his attractive young wife Laura, having presented him with three children, is fed up with their marriage. Consolation is supplied by her brother-in-law Titus, a ladies' man who is charming but feckless. Lintott, affable but remorseless, probes their affair and also puts the servants of the house under the microscope.

The upstairs-downstairs relationships are very well done, and there's an especially powerful presentation of a cruel nanny. There are lashings of period detail, and just occasionally the painstaking research shows itself a bit too obviously. But overall, it's very well done, and the story progresses in leisurely but engaging fashion. Lintott is an extremely good character, very well portrayed. I'd rank this, alongside Julian Symons' The Blackheath Poisonings among others, as one of the most enjoyable Victorian history-mysteries.

Forgotten Book - The Blackheath Poisonings

Once again, my pick for Patti Abbott’s series of Forgotten Books is a title by the late, great Julian Symons. The Blackheath Poisonings is one of his ventures into Victorian crime – Sweet Adelaide, based on the real-life Adelaide Bartlett case, is another – and it carries a particular memory for me.

During the 1990s, Nottingham was the place for crime fans to visit, during the annual Shots on the Page convention. The convention was, so far as I know, the brainchild of Maxim Jakubowski, who worked closely with film specialist Adrian Wootton. I missed the first of the conventions, but attended all the others and found them most enjoyable. They paved the way for Nottingham to host Bouchercon itself – quite a coup for Maxim and his colleagues, and the last time that Bouchercon crossed the Atlantic.

One year, the convention hosted an advance screening of an adaptation for TV of The Blackheath Poisoinings. The small screen version was excellent, benefiting from a first rate cast that included Zoe Wanamaker, Judy Parfitt and Ronald Fraser, as well as a screenplay that was sympathetic to Symons’ original story.

And a very good story it is, with a sharp eye on the sexual complexities lying just beneath the surface of late Victorian society. A respectable family is torn apart by poison, and poisonous suspicion. One of the characters is tried for murder, but before the story is concluded, there will be another death, and the revelation of an unsuspected criminal.

Julian Symons inscribed my copy of this novel (which is a hardback reprint, published not long before his death from cancer)when we were together at a CWA conference in Brighton. Characteristically, he added a question: ‘A good Victorian crime story?’ The answer is an unequivocal yes.

(P.S. - For unfathomable reasons, at present, I am able to send but not receive emails, so if you've emailed me in the past three days, please don't think the absence of a reply means I'm ignoring you....)