Crimson Friday, by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  

9798886011463

Stark House, 2025

originally published 1943

242 pp

paperback

(read earlier this month)

Another vacation read, Crimson Friday is the work of author Dorothy Cameron Disney, who published her first novel, Death in the Back Seat in 1936.  Eight more would come along over the next thirteen years including this one in 1943.  I'm quite sorry to say that I've only read one other book by this author, her The 17th Letter, but I do have Death in the Back Seat awaiting my attention on my Kindle.

Al and Janey Blake have left the hustle and bustle of New York City for the small village of Merristone, Connecticut, the site of Al's childhood home.   Al's brother Selby had convinced them to buy an "old New England house" so they've come back to the village awaiting the completion of the remodeling and staying in the home of Al's Aunt Mildred in the meantime. While the issues and the "difficulties with the remodeling venture" were part and parcel of the village gossip, the more pressing business in the local gossip circles was a woman who had moved into the village a year before, known as the "Merristone Enigma."  This is a certain V. Moran, and as Janey, who narrates the story notes, "After a residence of a year, the village had been unable to discover so much as Mrs. Moran's first name. The provocative initial on her mailbox remained unsolved." This is a woman who had two cats that she walked like dogs, and lived with a maid by the name of Hannah, described as "lantern-jawed, bespectacled" who gave people a "cold stare" and was obviously quite deaf, carrying an earphone around with her.  She wore a "dizzying succession of rainbow hues," complete with "floating veils," and Janey's convinced she's sticking to "a single style and a single garish color for each appearance."   A January Friday rolls around, and something unusal happens leaving Janey and Al completely speechless -- while on a walk one day, Hannah stops them to say that Mrs. V. Moran wants them for tea.  Al doesn't want to go at all, and reminds Jane that their family is supposed to be getting together that night so they wouldn't have time anyway, but Hannah finds them at their still-unfinished home and "enforces an acceptance."   So it's off they go, with Al's curiousity piqued now,  and find themselves walking into a true spectacle, highlighted by  Mrs. V. Moran wearing crimson.  As she explains,

"Friday's crimson for me... just as Thursday is yellow. A deep sulphur yellow. Saturday is always green. Sunday's white, of course, and Monday's blue." Electric blue..."

Things get weirder as teatime toddles along, with Mrs. V. Moran making her guests beyond uncomfortable with easy-to-spot lies, tears, "posing and posturing."  Finally, she makes an exit, leaving Al and Jane completely alone, so they go back to Aunt Mildred's for the planned family dinner.  For some reason, that goes south as well, so Alan takes everyone back to their property to see what's been happening there.  The architect decides to start with the stairway, using a flashlight to illuminate the scene.  But instead of seeing what he wants them to see, the light picks up the dead body of Hannah, who has a crushed skull, the result of having been beaten to death.  Worse, no one can find Mrs. V. Moran -- has something happened to her as well?   

Map in Dell 1946 edition, from Abebooks

Clues start piling up that link a specific person (who is not talking) to Hannah's death, but wait -- as everyone will soon begin to realize, nothing is actually as it seems in this murder.  I sort of guessed a small part of what was going on, but as for the larger picture, I had no clue.   The author is quite clever  with her plotting, establishing a set of mysterious circumstances in which a particular clue (or set of clues) lead to another plotline that then sheds an entirely new light on the story.  To say any more would be criminal, except that the early mention of "Pandora's Box" is not at all out of line in this mystery, and that the title doesn't really make sense until everything is revealed, at which point you'll probably find yourself (as I did) doing a big "aha!"  Another factor at play here is just how very much the family suffers as the case drags on, with the anxiety being writ large throughout.  The only issue I have is that while  I don't generally say this about older mystery stories, the motives behind certain actions (or inactions) in this book seem a bit dated (and to be honest, a bit on the melodramatic side) in our own time, but overall,  Crimson Friday gave me a good run at one of my favorite pastimes, armchair sleuthing, and was very, very entertaining.   I can certainly recommend this book to fellow readers of vintage crime.  And while I'm here, I hope Stark House continues to reprint Disney's work -- these two that I've read have been well worth every second of time I've invested.  

Thanks to Stark House as always for my advanced reading copy!  

Marble Hall Murders, by Anthony Horowitz

 

9780063305700

Harper Collins, 2025

582 pp

hardcover

We've just returned from a very long vacation which gave me the opportunity to read this book,  the third novel in this series featuring Susan Ryeland and yes, for series followers, Atticus Pünd is back as well.   While I won't be giving top much away here, I will mention that before the book even begins, there is a caveat to the reader that "the solution to Magpie Murders is revealed in this book," so to anyone considering Marble Hall Murders who hasn't yet read Magpie Murders and may be considering doing so, you've been warned.  

For those readers who are familiar with the previous two novels (the aforementioned Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders), Susan Ryeland has returned to the UK after her time in Crete, where she and her partner Andreas came to the end of their road, each realizing that they were "no longer in love." As she came to realize, "My head was in London while my heart was no longer in Crete,"  so it's back home she goes, working as a freelance associate editor for Causton Books (nice little nod to Midsomer Murders there).   Her boss hands her the first thirty-thousand words of a manuscript which is and a  continuation novel featuring Atticus Pünd, which "follows on from Magpie Murders."  The author is Eliot Crace,  the title, Pünd's Last Case. Susan has reservations about the project from the beginning, but she feels she has no choice due to financial considerations plus the fact that Causton Books "was the one place in town" that just might take her on full time in a badly-needed senior position. Crace came from a wealthy family; his grandmother, Miriam Crace, had been the author of a series of well-loved children's books that had been "turned into graphic novels, a cartoon series on ITV, a hugely popular musical ..., three feature films, a ride at Universal Studios," not to mention the merchandise and an upcoming Netflix five-season deal.   As with the other two books in the series, as Susan begins reading the manuscript, we too delve into Pünd's Last Case, which, as the dustjacket blurb reveals, is

"set in the South of France and revolves around the mysterious death of Lady Margaret Chalfont, days before she was about to change her will. But when it is revealed that Lady Margaret was poisoned, alarm bells begin to ring."

 Susan picks up on a few things in the manuscript that lead her to believe that Eliot may have based Pünd's Last Case on his own family, and hearkening back to the dustjacket blurb, "once again, the real and the fictional worlds have become dangerously entangled."  As readers of the previous two books in this series know, that is precisely how those stories have played out, but the stakes become a bit higher now as the body count rises and Susan finds herself at the center of it all.  

It sounds like it should be a great story, right?, and most readers on Goodreads believe it is, garnering an average and staggering 4.38-star review score.  I'm very likely the outlier here, because I didn't find this book nearly as enjoyable as I did the other two that came before. The usual book-within-a-book was quite honestly, underwhelming.  Normally I care more for the Atticus Pünd stories than for what's happening in Susan's present, but that didn't happen here.  Worse, I figured out the who in the Pünd story long before the actual reveal because it was beyond obvious.  Like, HELLO!!!   My other major issue is that the author only decides it's time to bring out the major twist in the Susan Ryeland story way too close to the final part of the book,  giving a really rushed feel to the novel's ending. There are more niggly things, but this post is getting a bit long.   On the other hand, I have to admit that it entertained me for well over two days, so that can't be a bad thing.  When all is said and done,  it just wasn't as entertaining or satisfying as its two predecessors, so for me it was a bit of a letdown.  But as I said, people are raving about Marble Hall Murders so if you're following the series, you may likely want to read it. 

from PBS: Lesley Manville and Tim McMullan

One of the tags I used for this post is "page to screen," since according to PBS,  there will be a third (and final) installment in the Masterpiece series starring Lesley Manville as Susan Ryeland and Tim McMullan as Atticus Pünd.  The previous two have been extremely bingeworthy, so even though I didn't care for the book as much as I might have, I will be ready to watch when the series rolls around again.