Greymarsh - Arthur J. Rees

THE STORY:  Sir Roger Liskard and his wife Linda are having a house party. The timing couldn't have been worse. As the guests arrive at Greymarsh, the Liskard's imposing house on the Norfolk coast, a storm is brewing. With the threat of abnormally high tides and surging waves indicating an impending flood the talk turns to Gothic legends, murder and the concept of Justice. Henry Liskard, Roger's brother and a painter of some renown grows weary of the talk which morphs into a legal debate. Henry leaves and takes his art world friends to his studio located in a tower that long ago served as a lighthouse for the area. There they view Henry's strange portrait of a nun contemplating an open grave while a figure representing the Devil watches from a thorny bush in the background. The three friends display reactions ranging from impressed to repulsed. Henry's studio is filled with similar paintings of macabre subject manner.  Eventually, the men leave Henry to retire for the night in his bedroom just off of the studio. He does not escort them out alarming the men who think he ought to lock the door. Henry assures them no one ever comes out to the tower and he often leaves the only entrance unlocked at night. The next morning Henry is found shot dead.  The door to the tower is open as is the door leading to his studio-bedroom. The guests realize almost immediately that due to the raging storm and the tsunami-like waves that flooded the grounds that they are all now on an isolated island and that one of them must have shot Henry.

THE CHARACTERS: After the lengthy exposition dealing with the house party and the several guests who attend, the story focuses on only a handful of people:  Roger & Linda Liskard; Herbert Lintwell, a lawyer who attends the house party; Avis Ormond, a village girl with whom Henry was enamored; George Rumsden, a sailor in love with Avis; Avis' father, a blind fisherman and Creeke, deaf-mute companion and aide to Avis' father. Colwin Grey and his lawyer friend Richard Haldham (the narrator of Part II of the novel) are summoned by Hugh Templeton, friend to Roger Liskard and uncle to Haldham. Templeton wants someone to clear the name of Roger Liskard who is a primary suspect in the shooting of Henry.

The night of the murder Templeton was awakened by a piercing scream coming from the vicinity of the tower.  He went out into the storm and found Roger Liskard a few feet from the tower's main entrance. He had apparently fallen and severely injured himself.  But Roger was also raving and terrified of what he had seen.  He talked about expiation using that word specifically and asked Templeton to make sure Linda knew what happened.  His final words before passing out into unconsciousness was a rant:  "No, no! I will not believe it!  The dead cannot return!" Templeton is both puzzled and frightened by those seemingly insane remarks. That rant alone is reason enough to have Colwin Grey find out exactly went on in the tower the night of the shooting.

Colwin Grey wastes no time in his investigations.  He is of the intuitive school of detection but also has superhuman intelligence and a wide knowledge on a variety of arcane topics. We learn, for example, that in his boyhood he was fascinated with seaweed and made a study of it.  This, of course, comes in extremely handy when he finds a piece of "blood red" seaweed near the tower.  It turns out to be of the Rhodophyta division, seaweed that can only grow in deep ocean water and may be an indication that someone traveling from the sea brought it up on shore.  Haldham and Templeton find it hard to believe that anyone would be mad enough to set out in a boat during the storm in order to gain access to the makeshift island created by the severe weather. It would've been a suicide mission. Grey is sure that someone did visit the tower by boat and that they suffered the consequences of the rash decision by being swallowed up by he sea.

Through subtle manipulation of villagers and playing into their love of gossip Grey learns of Henry's love of women. They served as his models for his paintings and the stories include strong intimations they were more than just models. Grey is also the first to notice that the partially hidden face of the nun in the painting still on the easel the night of Henry's death resembles Linda Liskard. This fact opens a whole Pandora's box of motives ranging from jealousy to revenge. This coupled with the fact that both Linda and Roger interrupted Lintwell in his investigation of the tower the day after the murder adds another level of suspense in a tale that begins to grow ever more complex.

We know from one of the earliest chapters that Henry enjoys meeting Avis in secret out by the coast where he sketches her and they talk of life in the village. Lately Avis has withdrawn from the world and is often seen wandering the marshlands and spending time in the cemetery at Henry's grave. Grey is concerned for Avis and her morose moods. He says, "Her grief strikes me as rather excessive--in the circumstances. No; the reason lies deeper than [grief]." Eventually he will confront her and manage to get her to confide in him, thus clearing up the one or two puzzling aspects of Henry's death. Grey is convinced the murderer is dead and tells Avis this thinking it will console her. But finding proof of his theories will take time and considerable effort.

ATMOSPHERE:  Greymarsh (1927) is populated with brooding characters haunted by the coastline and the power of the unpredictable sea. Rees' writing is at its best when he is describing the fury of the ocean and the storm that was such a threat to the partygoers at the Liskard home.  The macabre and the unexplained are also fascinating subjects for Rees. The first half of the story is a Gothic novel in miniature what with the florid descriptions of the sea, the legend of a murdered monk's skull that was supposed to remain in the tower lest all descendants of Greymarsh fall under its curse, and a story of an impossible murder that took place in Africa related to the men at a key moment during the party. Rees skillfully manages to insert these vignettes into the story’s framework creating both an anxious atmosphere and setting up a clever segue into the role of policemen and lawyers in murder cases.

That African murder tale serves as the springboard for a debate about justice and truth-seeking and will come back to haunt the partygoers when Henry is found dead.  Mortimer, a caustic art critic, reminds everyone of Lintwell's challenge to find a killer among an isolated group of suspects. Lintwell said if he had been in Africa he would never have allowed the seven men to leave until he found the culprit. Likewise, Mortimer says they are all in a similar situation: it seems as though one of their isolated group is a killer. This sets off Herbert Lintwell, an arrogant self-righteous lawyer, on a path of amateur detective work that will prove extremely detrimental to Roger, Linda, Avis and Templeton.

INNOVATIONS:  The detective work -- both from Lintwell in the first half and Grey in the second half -- is engaging and modeled after the old fair play techniques. The reader sees everything each man sees, he knows their thoughts, too. Nothing is held back. However, Lintwell is a sloppy detective and makes rash judgments. A clever reader will be able to note his mistakes prior to Grey revealing them to Haldham and Templeton.

Grey, on the other hand, is the "Transcendent Detective", as Carolyn Wells liked to call the sleuths of this era in detective fiction. He knows more than the average man, sees more, and is skilled at manipulating people into telling him more than they should ever tell. The clue of the seaweed is probably the highlight of the book. It's simultaneously bizarre and amusing, especially when Grey remarks that studying seaweed was his boyhood hobby. Later, Haldham accidentally finds a revolver by stepping on it in a pile of seaweed. Seaweed is key to unravelling the mysteries!

Northeaster by Winslow Homer (1895)
via Metropolitan Museum of Art

QUOTES: "And now? The sea was wreaking fresh wickedness. [...] In its unstable heart lurked treachery, and implacable hatred of mankind."

"...the encircling sea had seemed a joke, but it wore another aspect now, relentless as fate, impassable as time. The sea held them all there captive, until it thought fit to let them go."

"There is no room for sentiment or gentlemanly feelings where murder is concerned."

"The revelation of the likeness in the studio impressed me most, though I did not see that it carried far. And yet, in that veiled and enigmatic picture, the key of the problem might be concealed"

"A murderer has one deed of violence to repent, but a fool has to atone for his whole life."

Avis has a monologue that includes these pithy exclamations:  "The sea is worse than cruel. Cruelty does not matter so much, because everything in life is cruel. The sea is not only cruel--it is wicked as well. There is nothing it loves so much as to wreck ships and drown men. It is a place of ghosts..."

THE AUTHOR:  Arthur John Rees (1872–1942) was born in Melbourne, Australia.  In his early career he wrote for Australian newspapers including Melbourne Age and New Zealand Herald.  Sometime in his 20s he traveled to England where he settled. His first two detective novels were written in collaboration with John Reay Watson. In 1919 he wrote his first solo novel The Shrieking Pit lauded by Barzun & Taylor in A Catalogue of Crime (1989, revised) as "a first rate novel...distinguished from its fellows by an absolutely steady forward march through a variety of clues and contradictions."  I've read this admirable novel and it strikes me as being heavily influenced by Trent's Last Case (1913) even to the inclusion of a similar clue involving missing shoes and a young man and young woman lying in order to protect each other. After a brief series of novels featuring Colwin Grey, Rees introduced his new policeman detective, Inspector Luckcraft, who would feature in seven more mystery novels from 1926 through 1940.

Colwin Grey Detective Books
The Threshold of Fear (1925)
Simon of Hangletree (1926) - U.S. title The Unquenchable Flame (1926)
Greymarsh (1927)
The Investigations of Colwin Grey (1932) - collection of 8 stories and 2 novellas

 

The Croaking Raven - Gladys Mitchell

THE STORY: Despite its gruesome deaths by falling and crushing in a Norman castle The Croaking Raven (1966) is very much like a 21st century mystery. You know the kind:  tea parties and bakeries and gossipy characters, one of whom has an unusual profession. Like a tour guide of a castle who turns into an amateur sleuth when someone falls down a flight of stairs and dies.

It's Hamish Gavin's tenth birthday and for his present he has demanded that his family rent a castle in the advertisement he found in a local newspaper.  They do so and off they all go along with Dame Beatrice Bradley in tow.  Part of the lease requires the renters to open the grounds to visitors twice a week for four or five hours. Hamish can't wait to turn their rental property into a tourist trap. He mans the card table and collects the admission fee of a half crown, charges another shilling for parking cars in the courtyard and persuades his policeman father Robert Gavin, also a talented sketch artist, to whip up some souvenir drawings for yet another money making opportunity. All goes well until they start getting requests to see the bloodstains and are pestered with jokey queries about the ghost.

Bloodstains? Ghost? Did someone die in the castle? And how long ago was that?

Yes, indeed there was a death. Tom Dysey fell down the stairs the evening following a dreary party two years ago. And the rumors of a ghost are not just stories when the renters hear singing at night coming from within the walls and Hamish sees a white clothed figure appear in the dining room then slowly shrink and disappear into the floor. Is the castle truly haunted?  Hamish, his mother Laura, and Dame Beatrice turn sleuthing ghostbusters to find out what exactly is going on in the Dysey estate. Not much later after they settle in another person falls to his death.

CHARACTERS:  There's quite a large cast here and nearly everyone is a Dysey forcing Dame Beatrice and the others to refer to nearly everyone by their first name. There's Tom, the first victim of death by falling, and his brothers Eustace and Cyril.  Cyril's wife whose first name I don't even recall because she's always referred to as "Cyril's wife" nearly every time in order to avoid confusion with the other Mrs. Dysey (widow of Tom) whose first name is Henrietta. She goes by Etta but she's rarely called Mrs. Dysey because another Henrietta turns up and she also claims to be a Mrs. Dysey.  Who exactly is she supposed to be married to?  Tom?  Eustace?  We never find out the truth about this other Henrietta until the final third of the book. This other Henrietta appears only once in the story as a comic figure. She is a tourist who claims to be psychic and refuses to pay admission to the castle as she is a member of the historical society and she should be exempt.  This second Henrietta may appear only once but her persona hovers over all the proceedings.

Then there are the Carters who we also learn late in the book are related to the Dyseys because the grandmother was born Charlotte Dysey and is the great aunt of all the other Dyseys. And did I forget Bonnamy Dysey?  Henrietta Dysey (Tom's widow, that is) had a memorial plaque in his name placed on the outer walls of the castle and everyone assumes he's dead. But is he really?

Chillingham Castle courtyard,
supposedly the most haunted
castle in the UK

The tangled web of Dyseys and Carters, two mysterious deaths and an absent relative make up only a small sample of the many unanswered riddles. Dame Beatrice wants to make sense of it all but it will take a lot of intense questioning and probing to unravel the skeins of ambiguity. Not many people are willing to cooperate until the second, in some cases third, confrontation with the formidable Beatrice Lestrange Bradley.

We get a cameo from Jonathan Bradley (the Dame's younger son) and his cipher of a wife Deborah, too.  Jonathan helps explain the mystery of the ghost and in so doing uncovers a secret passage. Not a real spoiler as this happens very early in the book. The secret passage plays a very large part in the story.

The best characters in any Gladys Mitchell mystery are the supporting players.  I will mention Percy Bellairs, the gardener at the castle and Mrs. Dysey (Cyril's wife) as two of the most interesting and intriguing of this rather large cast.  And Hamish is an utter delight. Precocious to be sure, as most of Mitchell's child characters usually are, but delightful nonetheless.  Mitchell was a former schoolteacher and you can tell her love of children whenever they appear in her books.  They are almost all infectiously affable.  Sadly, he disappears with his father for the bulk of the book. Robert and Hamish both return at the end and luckily mother Laura (secretarial assistant/business associate to Mrs. Beadley for many of the novels) has a surprise for him when she reveals the secret of the ghost in the final paragraphs. It's a tidy and heartwarming way to end the novel.

Tom Dysey falls down a newel stairway
or spiral staircase to modern readers

INNOVATIONS:  Detection occurs in The Croaking Raven but much of it take place offstage, peripherally mentioned and then discussed after the fact at length in wordy dialogue laden passages. For example: Why don't we follow Dame Beatrice into the priest's hole and watch her train her flashlight as she explores the space and then lands her light on the second corpse that dies by falling? Instead we get these two sentences: "So saying, she ducked under the low doorway and made for the steps. It was a long time before she reappeared." Considering Mitchell's predilection for outré plot elements, legends, ghosts, and hauntings this was a huge missed opportunity for added creepiness. Nearly all of the book is devoted to lengthy Q&A sessions that are often interrupted forcing Dame Beatrice to seek out individuals two or three times to pester them again for the questions still unanswered.

I must mention one thing that I marvel at when I read a Gladys Mitchell mystery novel. She is a master at rendering regional dialects. Never does she ridicule speech patterns or odd vocabulary, it is always done with authenticity and respect. No other writer of crime fiction is as skilled at this as Gladys Mitchell. Truly! I've read hundred of books with phonetic dialects and 90% are just wretchedly mimicked (revealing more about the author's sense of hearing than accurate vocal inflections) or an utter mockery of the dialect. Mitchell loves the rhythm, the elisions, and the rich and unusual vocabulary and slang. Reading the dialogue of Bellairs, the gossipy gardener and Cyril's wife, an angry woman whose speech always reveals her tone and hidden frustrations, were for me the best parts of this novel. I could definitely hear their voices as I read those passages.

Only the final third of the novel really delivers the goods. Much of the detective work is surmising about primogeniture, birthright, birth order in the Dysey family and trying to secure a motive for the two deaths of the Dysey brothers.  Is it a greedy fortune hunter?  Is it revenge for the "bastard" child Henry whose parentage is never really known until the final pages? All the familial rehash, genealogy and talk of who will inherit got to be dreary. Only when the Raven's Hoard is mentioned do things finally pick up. This is a legend about a hidden treasure stowed away by Jesuits during the late 18th century. Then a bible is stolen, and returned mysteriously, rudely dumped in a pig sty. Soon Dame Beatrice is off on another puzzle solving adventure that will involve a strange code found in underlined passages in a text book on household care.  All these odd plot maneuvers are typical of Gladys Mitchell, reminding me again of the strange gimmicks in contemporary cozy mystery novels.

Overall,  The Croaking Raven is kind of a mixed bag. As usual, Mitchellesque epigraphs head each chapter. This time she selects passages from a variety of obscure Scottish folk songs to hint at the content of each chapter. Even with these atmospheric touches, attempting to inject eerie frissons with their allusions to ghosts and violent death, The Croaking Raven meanders along with intermittent thrills and a few surprises until its somewhat predictable end. The villains are not a surprise, some of the mysteries fizzle out, others never fully explained, and the finale seems too pat. I'd recommend this only to those who are Mitchell completists.

EASY TO FIND? Not really. I bought my copy decades ago and I've not seen one since. There is no US edition and I know of no paperback reprint since it was first published in 1966. But! I'm offering mine for sale online and just lowered the price. It's the only copy currently for sale.