NEW STUFF: Murder at Gulls Nest - Jess Kidd

I will always read anything published by Jess Kidd, one of the most imaginative Irish writers of the past 20 years. I first heard of her through the dozens of rave reviews for her unique genre blending debut Himself (2016), a mix of crime novel and ghost story. But the first book I read of hers was Mr Flood's Last Resort (2017) -- original UK title The Hoarder -- an unconventional mystery novel which also coincidentally has some ghosts in it. She has written all sorts of novels, including a book geared for young readers, all of which tend to feature some element of a traditional mystery novel though none of them were true detective novels until she wrote Things in Jars (2019), a wild, dizzying imaginative mystery thriller with a real detective that blends bizarre murders with supernatural creatures and Irish mythology. She followed that third novel with an unusual historical adventure and coming of age novel, The Night Ship (2022), based on the actual shipwreck of a Dutch sailing vessel in the 17th century. Now she has turned her hand to a full fledged, retro Golden Age mystery completely embracing the traditional detective novel.

As much as I wished that she would have created a series character with Bridie Devine, her Victorian era woman detective from Things in Jars, we are now promised a series character in the person of Nora Breen, the protagonist of Murder at Gulls Nest.  Nora is a former nun who has recently left her cloistered existence in the Carmelite monastery of High Dallow and traveled to Kent to the resort town of Gore-on-Sea which sounds suspiciously like a real city in West Sussex that I know is the home of one of my favorite rare bookselling entities (World of Rare Books in Goring-by-Sea). Here she sets up in the boarding house of the title hoping to learn what happened to another nun from her monastery who also left the order after getting ill and needing to recuperate in the outside world. Frieda Borgan, the young nun Nora befriended, promised to write to Nora regularly. When those news-filled letters suddenly stopped in August Nora decided to find out what happened to Frieda that would prevent her from writing.  A prologue pretty much hints at her fate alerting us to expect an unhappy outcome for Frieda.

Nora starts her inquiry on the sly. She comes across as a busybody yet oddly manages to gather quite a bit of information. Within days one of the boarders dies unexpectedly and everyone assumes the person committed suicide. Nora and the another boarder think otherwise.

This is a well done traditional mystery novel, following too closely perhaps to formula, but not without Kidd's requisite offbeat humor and touches of the bizarre. Among the oddball characters are an elderly puppeteer who specializes in Punch and Judy performances, a stern housekeeper/cook who serves up unpalatable meals and runs the boarding house like a jail with rigid rules, a strange 10 year-old girl who refuses to speak and dresses like a miniature Miss Haversham, and the local reverend who lives next door and cultivates a huge brood of rabbits - his only friends - as he tends to dislike most people. Reverend Audley (an allusion to Braddon?) was maybe my favorite of the supporting characters. Another unusual character is Hosmer, the artsy photographer Nora meets in town, who both offers her info on a boarder who fled Gulls Nest immediately after the supposed suicide and also takes her portrait in a quirky scene involving jazz music and Nora's shedding her inhibitions in a literal dance of freedom. Also worth nothing as typical Kiddian quirkiness are the scenes with Nora feeding a seagull she names after a priest. The bird regularly visits her on the ledge outside her bedroom window, she mulls over the case, and discusses her ideas with the gull as the bird swallows chunks of herring Nora has bought for the bird to snack on.

Ultimately the characters and their relationships make Murder at Gulls Nest an enjoyable read and distract from endless Q&A sequences that otherwise might have proved tiresome. Inspector Rideout, the primary policeman of the book, has an intriguing relationship with Nora -- at first adversarial, then giving way to mutual admiration, and finally budding friendship. At one point Rideout says to Nora:

"The war hasn't helped. It has blown us apart in so many ways; the old rituals, the old beliefs no longer hold. We want death, like life, to have a reason. [...] Sometimes we have to accept that when it comes to matters of life and death, we can't know everything and never will."

I think this is what Kidd was attempting to accomplish with this homage to the traditional mystery.  She has succinctly and simply summed up the post-WW2 mindset. How war has permanently changed all preconceived notions of modern life and all human interaction.  Perhaps there will be no real tidy ending that will explain all the death and misery churned up at Gulls Nest.

Kidd knows the genre well and has already proven she is a wiz at dreaming up complex and fairly clued plots.  however, in this outing as formulaic as it is and not so cleverly clued I was able to figure many of the twists dozens of chapters before Nora had any idea what was going on.  I think most readers well read in mystery fiction will be able to figure out some secrets early on and see through some of the misdirection.  I was hoping for a finale in which Dinah, the mute child, would suddenly regain her speech and become the real detective of the piece by pointing out everything she had overheard while hiding behind curtains and in the sideboard of the dining room. Alas! no such denouement occurs. The finale is indeed rather melodramatic and Dinah does play a part in the unmasking of the rather obvious villain.

I look forward to Nora's next adventure in which she will solve a series of "supernatural murders" associated with a seance that goes terribly wrong. There is a medium and a seance in Murder at Gulls Nest, but whether the medium Miss Elspeth Dence (very reminiscent of the kooky Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit) will also appear in the next book I will not know until I can read it. Book two of the Nora Breen investigations entitled Murder at the Spirit Lounge is due out in June 2026.