It's Her Own Funeral - Carol Carnac

THE STORY:  Anne Tempest is recuperating from a broken leg. Her primary caretaker and niece, Isobelle Verringer, decides she has  had enough of her aunt and the gloomy house. She summons two young cousins to come live with their great aunt, to take over as caretakers of both the bedridden woman and the grounds so Isobelle can finally leave.  The cousins -- brother and sister Roland and Jane -- move in and make substantial improvements to the antiquated home. The major renovation project is getting a gas cylinder operated stove to replace the immense, impractical and ancient range in the kitchen. Within weeks there is a horrible gas leak and the Palings, husband and wife servants working for Aunt Anne, succumb to gas inhalation and pass out in the kitchen. Jane rescues both servants then rushes upstairs to Aunt Anne whose bedroom is directly above the kitchen. The rafters have cracks in the ceiling and anyone can see through those cracks into Aunt Anne's bedroom floor. Jane fears the gas made its way into the bedroom and rushes upstairs. But she is too late. Her great aunt is dead and has been for hours, her body rigid and a disconcerting smile on her face.

THE CHARACTERS: It's Her Own Funeral (1952) is a claustrophobic story confined to a small cast of only five major characters along with policeman Julian Rivers who shows up to investigate the suspicious gas leak. The ruinous Tempest estate is a character unto itself. It consists of the old main house, filled with empty rooms and decrepit furnishings dating back centuries, and a cottage which was the home of the Palings. They've been displaced by Isobelle so that Roland and Jane can move in and make their home there. The Palings are ordered to move into the main house where they can be closer to Anne. Maggie Paling and her husband do not leave too willingly as they love the cottage, but eventually relent and give up their treasured cozy home for the young people.

The book is as much a murder mystery as it is a study of differing generations. Aunt Anne representing the eldest generation clinging to a past, honoring the antiquity of the only home she's known since her childhood.  Isobelle, one generation removed from Anne Tempest, is the haughty indifferent and impatient agent of a generation so desirous of moving forward with little room in her heart (what little heart she has) for a past best forgotten and buried. She cannot abide Dene Manor with its dust filled rooms, museum like atmosphere filled with useless relics and dour faced portraits of her ancestors hanging on the dingy walls. In fact she outright states she loathes the place on every occasion she can. Of course Jane and Roland, the youngest members of the cast, are the symbols of a bright and carefree future.

Roland is a would-be poet who looks forward to steeping himself in his family's rich past. Snuggled in the coziness of the warm and inviting cottage he plans to draw on that past to inspire him. Before Great-Aunt Anne dies she remarks that Roland is a remarkable dopplegänger for her brother, Roland's namesake and the black sheep of the Tempest family. The long dead and elder Roland, grandfather of Jane and her brother, had fallen in love with a servant and was disowned by his father. Roland the younger shares with his grandfather the Tempest temper; both Rolands have an angry violent streak. Inspector Rivers learns that Roland displayed that anger when the intrusive Guy Deraine, another cousin in the Tempest dynasty, barged into the cottage uninvited to lecture Jane on her "thievery." Guy suspects that the siblings took not only furniture from the main house but valuable objects and he wants them returned.  Roland interrupted the argument and ended it by punching Guy in the nose.  rivers suspects that Roland' temper may be a sign of a murderous streak.  Could the brother and sister be truly guilty of stealing from their aunt and killed her to get their hands on everything they wanted?

Complications arise with the introduction of two neighboring families who are tenant farmers on the Tempest estate. Of these two families the most intriguing of them are the Boltons and their strange daughter Kathie. Kathie is described by nearly everyone -- especially disdainful Isobelle -- as a deviant or a half-wit. She behaves oddly, chants in a sing-song manner, is often found hiding in bushes and shrubbery spying on the members of the Tempest household.  Rumor has it she also enters the Tempest kitchen uninvited regularly helping herself to food she may find on the table. Maggie Paling insists that Kathie has never set foot in the kitchen. And so Rivers tests the rumor with a fascinating experiment and learns that Kathie is easily tempted with treats.  In fact, it's quite possible that the girl entered the kitchen without anyone knowing. Was she responsible for monkeying with the gas taps? And did she cause the accidental death of Anne Tempest and the gas poisoning of the servants?

There is more to Kathie than any reader may suspect. She becomes instrumental in the story and her mother, a drunken woman of mercurial disposition with an ethnic background as a "gypsy", is the most surprising character of the entire novel. Mrs. Bolton has an adversarial relationship with nearly everyone due to her "gypsy" nature. She thinks very little of Mrs. Paling, and Rivers soon learns the feeling is mutual. But the relationship between Kathie and her mother and the somewhat startling secret that Mrs. Bolton keeps from everyone except the penetrating interrogation of Julian Rivers adds quite an unexpected twist to the already very convoluted and twisty plot.

INNOVATIONS:  Witchcraft comes up frequently throughout the story.  Mrs. Bolton is a gypsy with strange powers. Many people Rivers interviews mention the day Kathie wandered into the woods and "came back changed."  This coupled with the heavy Gothic descriptions of Dene Manor add a level of superstition and "the unknown" to a novel already teeming with unease and creepiness. Additionally, Rivers finds witnesses who talk of Anne Tempest as a witch for she eschewed modern medicine and concocted her own remedies using herbs from her rich and varied garden.

A subplot is introduced ever so subtly when Guy Deraine pursues his suspicions of Jane and Roland as stealing "valuables" from the main house. When Rivers questions Guy about what exactly the valuables consist of the man cannot name anything specific. He has only feelings and instinct that the brother and sister came to Dene Manor with ulterior motives. But Rivers sees the odd relationship between Isobelle and Guy (she openly insults Guy and belittles his accusations of the young people as petty thieves) as an artifice covering up something far more sinister. Anyone familiar with detective novel conventions would immediately suspect haughty Isobelle of ulterior motives herself. Her personality is so cultivated in its contempt for everyone and everything it can't possibly be genuine. Carnac handles the subtleties of this subplot and strews about a plethora of red herrings with mastery.  I was sure that Isobelle was a villain of some sort, but was ultimately surprised when Rivers exposes a truly devious clash of wills between several unsuspected villains that had been cleverly embedded throughout the entire book.

QUOTES:   Those who worked with Rivers at Scotland Yard knew how deceptive were his sleepy glance and his amiable if sometimes flippant manner. Rivers had not only an observant and retentive mind, he had a lively imagination, and a very small item of evidence sometimes set his imagination working, so that he saw the relevance of a fact which, however small, seemed anomalous.

"Nonsense is mischievous sometimes," said Rivers, "especially if people let themselves get frightened by it."

An Isobelle rant:  "If I have to put up with much more melodrama, I shall be a mental case Have you got enough imagination to realise what it's like for a civilized being in this charnel house? It's as if death were gibbering at you round every corner. Look at it!"

He thought hard as he strode along, and it occurred to him that his progress through the mist was very akin to his detection in this case.  In front of him was still the impenetrable mist of uncertainty. On either side were indications of progress--small facts which could be likened to the frosty verges which his torch illuminated. And how easy it would be to fall into the ditch or to take a side turning in detection, Rivers was only too well aware. [...] the ditch ready to fall into--the bottomless ditch which awaits every detective whose awareness fails to interpret the facts which edge his path.

EASY TO FIND?  Remarkably this Carol Carnac mystery was reprinted in a variety of formats apart from the original UK and US hardcover editions, some of which are out there for sale but of course are also the most expensive options. In the UK and Canada It's Her Own Funeral was reprinted by Collins in a paperback edition under their "White Circle Crime Club" imprint.  I found two of those offered for sale online. In the US the novel was reprinted as part of the ubiquitous Detective Book Club in a 3-for-1 omnibus. There are a handful of those DBC editions out there waiting for purchase.  These are always the cheapest options and you get two other books: Dead Man's Plan by Mignon G. Eberhart and Death Begs the Question by Lois Eby & John C. Fleming.

Oh, one more thing (as Lt. Columbo liked to say)... You can buy my copy  Sorry…it sold in only three days. Happy hunting for another copy.

Upstairs and Downstairs - Carol Carnac

Though written in an era well past the heyday of the Golden Age of detective fiction Upstairs and Downstairs (1950) is redolent of books that flourished two decades earlier. So far I’ve only read this one mystery novel by Edith Rivett in her “Carol Carnac” guise, but it is definitely a candidate for the Humdrum school of detective fiction. Carnac creates a baffling crime dependent on gadgetry and a web of questionable alibis that rival anything found in the pages of John Rhode or Freeman Wills Crofts, two of the masters of that subgenre in which the plot and puzzle take precedence. The story is almost exclusively devoted to painstakingly reconstructing how the murder was committed and who was where when the victim was killed. Almost entirely absent is any delving into character, relationships and motives. In fact, I found only two of the characters compelling enough to talk about in this review.

Upstairs and Downstairs despite a title that seems to allude to servants and their masters is not set in a manor house or country estate. Rather the setting is a research hospital where the upstairs crew is made up of doctors and executives running the facility while the downstairs staff consists of the varied men and women who deal with the massive amounts of paperwork stored in a complex filing system that takes up two entire floors.

The murder victim is head file clerk, Mr. Chindle, an odious man hardly well liked and little respected. His daily battle with the majority of women who make up the filing team is aggravated by his misogyny, foul breath and rank body odor. He had habit of undermining everyone, eavesdropping on conversations and committing petty thefts in order to cover his debts incurred as the result of addictive gambling and extravagant bets on long shots at the horse races. The day of the murder a pearl necklace belonging to June Banbrugh, the most recently hired file clerk, goes missing. It’s no surprise when he is found with his head bashed in from a fire escape ladder that apparently became accidentally dislodged from its hinged mount.  The pearl necklace turns up in Chindle's pocket.

Inspector Julian Rivers investigates the apparent accident and immediately suspects that the ladder was tampered with. An elevator near the fire escape ladder has proven to have an eccentric mechanical flaw. Passengers can hit the “Stop” button and cause the car to change direction from up to down, and vice versa. Rivers begins to imagine that the elevator may have been employed to create a death trap. As the case progresses he will find numerous bits of evidence to support his theory and the case begins to look more and more like deliberate murder.

Mechanics and gadgetry are the fascination of this plot. In addition to the fire escape ladder used as a murder weapon and the odd elevator that can change direction in mid-journey there is a telephone system with poorly installed wiring that allows people to pick up extensions and listen in on conversations. Entire chapters are devoted to Rivers and his police crew monkeying with the ladder in a variety of experiments to see how it falls, investigating the elevator shafts and making various phone calls to find out which lines are affected by the wiring and acoustical anomalies. I enjoyed Julian Rivers a lot more than Rivet’s other policemen Inspector Macdonald who appears in her detective novels written as “E. C. R. Lorac”. Rivers has a slightly more lively personality, exhibits a sense of humor ("Aren't you [fond of bed]?  I am. I was born lazy") and often is smiling at various stages in the story. In contrast I’ve always remembered Macdonald as dour and uninteresting, a personality-less cipher.

Among the supporting characters the best scenes feature Wilson, the head of security, or chief porter as Carnac calls him in the novel. He is an intelligent man with a lot of opinions but who is unwilling to augment those opinions with gossip. He is the most helpful of anyone in the research facility. The doctors on the other hand are a secretive bunch, duplicitous and deceitful giving contradictory statements frustrating Rivers at every opportunity. Highly protective of the work they are doing on viruses and the common cold they are stubborn in revealing what they were doing when Chindle was killed.

Another memorable sequence has Rivers visiting a boarding house where Chindle lived.  Mrs Mason, the landlady, gives some info that further proves Chindle was a thief then with some prodding allows Rivers to see his room.  Because she is tired of policeman entering the house and mucking about which has led to her boarders gossiping about the murder victim's life she insists that Rivers pretend to be a prospective boarder. They role play as if she is allowing him to view the apartment as a possible renter.  In this little bit of improvised theater Mrs. Mason reveals more about her character as a landlady and how she views her lodgers. Carnac does a neat job here once again resorting to wry humor and allowing us to see Rivers as a man of humor and unusual bent of will who will indulge in others' whims to get what he needs.

Overall, I enjoyed this mystery novel.  It's rather complex and sometimes a bit convoluted, but it was never really dull.  Wilson, Mrs. Mason, Rivers and some of the doctor characters held my interest, though admittedly the doctors at the facility seemed entirely interchangeable and not too well delineated.  The murder method turns out to be overly elaborate and rather ingenious.  I couldn't help but think of books like The Death of Laurence Vining, Fatal Descent (aka Drop to his Death) and Elevator to the Gallows (aka Frantic) when the focus turned to the elevator rather than the ladder than crushed Mr. Chindle. Carnac's subtle sense of humor was a welcome addition to the book and made me want to read more of the books featuring Julian Rivers and avoid the Lorac books which for the most part I have found rather dry and dull. And so there will be more Carnac reviews coming in the next month.  Stay tuned.