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. 

I've Got No Strings

By request, a brief overview of my life as a puppeteer:


Mina sees Lucy as an inviting snack in Dracula

I originally came to Chicago to be a playwright and actor. The playwright part blew up in my face because like any passionate but naive theater artist I thought I was a demi-god and could do it all. Orson Welles minus the financial smarts and bravado. I allowed myself to be bullied and things got very ugly. I gave up playwriting and directing for many, many years. But theater seemed to me my only life. I ended up acting in non-Equity theater from 1987 through 2004. I was member of three different acting ensembles over that time period, I had an agent and went on a handful of awful commercial auditions and modeling go-sees until I decided I hated that part of acting and devoted myself only to the stage. I earned money from everything I did. If it didn't pay, I didn't audition. It wasn't enough to live on, though, so I was also earning most of my income as an office temp worker. But my interest in theater and acting began to dwindle around 1999 when the world of books became my focus.

Somewhere in the late 1990s (I can't recall the exact date) I read of an audition for a puppet company and it turned out to be Hystopolis Productions, a company that was on the rise. They had just put together an amazing adaptation of Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine which had gone to the now defunct Jim Henson International Puppet Festival in New York and was quite a sensation there. They were looking to start up a junior ensemble of beginner puppeteers who would tour the Midwest with kid's shows - which had been their focus for years - while the founders, Larry Basgall and Michael Schwabe, continued to develop more advanced adult shows like The Adding Machine and their previous hit Ubu Roi, based on Alfred Jarry's play.

I ended up being selected with two other guys (both strangely enough named Adam) and we were broken in as puppeteers doing Hystopolis' old stand-by version of Rumpelstiltskin. I had seen that show at the many Chicago street festivals in the past. It was an insane blend of Saturday morning cartoon antics, madcap wild action, very adult humor that usually went over the heads of the kids and skillful Bunraku style puppetry. Most of the puppets were hand and glove puppets (like Rump at right), a few were rod puppets, and some were nothing more that objects on a stick. I operated three puppets and did their voices: Puss in Boots (who wanders in from another story as a cameo), a character named Egghead (I can't remember its purpose), and Rumpelstiltskin. We were also required to learn other parts in case one of us was unavailable for a gig. So I also learned to operate three or four other puppets and do my version of those voices as well. Later we developed an original script I devised for a holiday touring show called A Dragon for Christmas. For that play I operated two puppets and did their voices: the Wizard and Queen Foradae. There was also an ill-fated attempt at an African folktale show that was more masks and movement than puppetry. It had a story about Anansi the Spider, a cool leopard, and had an amazing elephant puppet in it. I think we did it only once though. I have not been big on picture taking when it came to theater and casts I was a part of and so I have nothing to show for this part of my life. I do, however, still have the original script for A Dragon for Christmas.


Dracula attacks Professor Van Helsing as Lucy looks on.

Eventually there was no more money to pay us. I think a grant expired. And so the junior touring company was disbanded. Sometime later Larry Basgall managed to track me down and tell me that Hystopolis was back in business at Red Hen Theater (no longer around). They were working on Dracula at the time and he wanted to get me involved in adapting a new kids' show based on "The Three Little Pigs." A series of botched phone messages (remember answering machines?) screwed everything up and I never got involved with them.

Larry and Michael now live in Michigan. Michael, who founded the company back in the late 1980s, still teaches puppetry. According to his Facebook page for Hystopolis Productions he taught a workshop at Ox Bow in Saugatuck this past summer. I miss those guys. We had a blast touring Illinois and making trips to the Botanical Gardens in St. Louis doing all those shows. Getting drunk and high in hotel rooms, laughing a lot, taking turns driving the dilapidated van all over the Midwest, and doing really good puppetry. It was one of the better theater related periods in my life.

For more photos of Hystopolis Productions' fantastically rendered version of Dracula go here.