Verity Preston, a playwright, lives in the village of Upper Quintern, a fairly typical specimen of the GA village (although this book was written in 1978). Among her neighbours are Sybil Foster a self-dramatising and rich divorcee and her daughter Prunella, the millionaire newcomer Nikolas Markos and his son Gideon, and the new gardener - called (a very Marsh sort of joke) Gardener who's services are much in demand. Not far away is the luxury health farm, Greengages, where the new Doctor, Dr Schramm (born Smythe but we are to think of Scam) turns out to be a very old, and very unsatisfactory flame of Verity's. When Sybil's highly suspicious step-son Claude turns up, Sybil retreats to Greengages, but has not been there very long before she is murdered. Enter Alleyn.
This is very far from being the disaster of Last Ditch (being other very late Marshes) but one could not claim that it is especially good either. In some ways it conforms to the classic Marsh pattern - the opening chapters, pre-murder, pre-Alleyn, are good, but things deteriorate thereafter; unfortunately he enters pretty early in this book. Verity Preston is an agreeable, reflective protagonist, who makes one rather wish that Marsh had used more women of her age (50) as central characters - she certainly provides a needed foil to Marsh's psychotic spinsters (excellent though those portrayals are). The book is a pleasant enough ramble but lacks either the brilliant plot or compelling interest to make it more than that.
NickH.
Published by Ngaio Marsh when she was 83, "Grave Mistake" certainly is a better effort than Agatha Christie's "Postern of Fate" (1973), published when Christie was that same age. But it's still a distinctly minor work by this talented author.
Grave Mistake is one of those British village mysteries that cozy-loving Americans particularly seem to enjoy reading. Several other Marsh village mysteries, most notably Overture to Death (1938), Scales of Justice (1955) and Off with His Head (1956), are among her most popular tales. Grave Mistake is a weaker tale than those, but should still offer some enjoyment to cozy fans. The village in Grave Mistake is Upper Quintern, one of those rural locales in classical English mystery that always seems about twenty years out of date (for example, Overture to Death feels like it should be taking place in 1918 at best and Scales of Justice and Off With His Head in the 1930s).
Though presumably Grave Mistake takes place around 1977, it seems to be that the village is composed solely of wealthy, mostly jobless, women and the people who serve them. Oh, and that Greek multi-millionaire who bought up one of the local mansions and about whom no one is quite sure. The servants are more independent here than in many of the pre-WW2 tales and competition for their services is fierce. The gardener even expects to be called "Mister"--imagine!
Marsh novels usually have a pair of winning young lovers, it seems, and we have such a pair here. Marsh provides one short scene of the couple where she not too convincingly tries to convey the language of people born around 1960 (lamentably, the word "groovy" is uttered), but mostly her focal point is Verity Preston, a fiftysomething, unmarried, intelligent, charming, sensitive playwright. If you think this might be Marsh herself, more or less, you may be on to something.
Eventually one of the local society ladies is smothered to death in the fashionable sanitarium she has checked herself into for a "rest"(shades of P. D. James' recent novel, The Private Patient) and the doctor who owns this clinic is straight out of Marsh's own Death and the Dancing Footman," from nearly forty years earlier) and soon enough Superintendent Alleyn shows up with Inspector Fox to restore order in the village. Alleyn still calls his subordinate "Br'er Fox" and, even more egregious, "Foxkin"; but I suppose Fox had put up with this for 44 years and was surely nearing retirement, so he was able to restrain himself from finally snapping and throttling "Handsome Alleyn" on the spot. For their part, the posh members of the local gentry still comment on how Alleyn is so much more a gentleman than they would have expected, his being a policeman and all.
As the above may suggest, there's plenty in "Grave Mistake" that would have been guaranteed to have set Raymond Chandler's remaining teeth on edge, had be survived until 1978 and sat down to read this tale. There's an Aunty Boo. The lovely young well-born girl is named Prunella. She calls Verity, who is her Godmother, Godma V (as in, "Godma V, it's a stinker"). People love to use the word "lolly" ("Daddy was a wizard with the lolly" actually gets said here). But, then, Marsh wasn't writing for Chandler, was she? My favorite character by far was the stepson of the murder victim, nicknamed by all the gentry ladies "Charmless Claude." He's a feckless character, a sponging waster and loser in his late thirties (a slacker as we would say today) who still is tremendous fun to read about as his ineffectual plotting comes to naught. The charming people, by contrast, I found a bit tiresome.
The mystery itself is a disappointment. It's extremely straightforward and lacking in complexity and ingenuity, though it is fairly presented. But I suspect many did not mind this when Grave Mistake appeared in 1978, two years after Agatha Christie had been been lost to the mystery-loving world. I imagine, rather, that most enjoyed simply immersing themselves in the cozy comforts of a classical form English mystery.
Curt Evans
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