The Miss Silver Mysteries Volume One: Grey Mask, The Case Is Closed, and Lonesome Road by Patricia WentworthMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I picked up this book because I'd read another Wentworth, The Fire Within , which isn't a mystery novel, although initially it looks like it's going to be one. I was impressed with the author's handling of the character relationships, and thought I might get something with a bit more depth than the average pulpy mystery of the early 20th century.
Well, the first book, Grey Mask, was a disappointment to me. It's one of those books which convey the impression that London is a small village with a population of about two dozen people, based on how frequently the characters cross paths by pure random chance, and there were no fewer than three Convenient Eavesdrops, my least favourite plot device. (view spoiler)
There is a fraught relationship between a man and a woman, who used to be engaged but now are not; this seems to be the author's speciality. But the mystery/thriller aspects appear cribbed from books in which they're done better, such as The Black Star by Johnston McCulley (criminal conspiracy, led by a masked figure, ordinary people manipulated into being part of it, known by numbers) or Edgar Wallace's The Man Who Knew (unassuming detective who can find out anything about anyone - though "sleuthess" Miss Silver doesn't have any associates that we see evidence of, so she appears, implausibly, to be doing all her own legwork).
Like the "Man who Knew," unfortunately Miss Silver doesn't actually solve the mystery, either. The villain is self-identified (when the characters get too close to the secret, so that part is not without character agency), and foiled by complete chance. It's not in any way a "fair play" mystery; two separate characters have been moving behind the scenes, and end up just giving us exposition of what we couldn't have guessed and the detective didn't work out.
It also contains one of the most maddeningly silly young women I've ever seen depicted in print, though given that I try to avoid characters like that, I've probably missed a good many. She is supposed to be maddeningly silly, though, so no demerits to the author for that. There's also a highly intelligent woman who takes important action which saves her and her love interest, so that's something. But overall, I felt it was an author writing outside her genre, not doing a great job with the genre elements, and patching the plot together with coincidences and eavesdrops.
The second book in this collection, The Case is Closed, also relies on coincidence to a degree. I give an exemption for inciting incidents being coincidental, but the inciting incident is not the last time the heroine, Hilary (who has busted up with her fiancé, just like the heroine in the first book), has a chance meeting with the servant couple whose testimony clinched the conviction of her cousin's husband for murdering his uncle. It's like there's a gravitational well pulling them together in random places. Hilary is in those places investigating, but coincidence still plays a big role.
Hilary's definitely-no-longer-fiancé, Henry, is the one who engages Miss Silver, and keeps asking her to investigate further even though all his internal arguments are against doing so. The suspicion is that the servant couple was lying in their testimony, and that the imprisoned man's cousin, who inherited under a new will executed on the day of the uncle's death, somehow is involved, although he has an apparently rock-solid alibi four hundred miles from the murder.
It's a promising setup, and soon we have real danger for Hilary, and stronger grounds for suspicion, and Hilary and Henry are clearly back together even if she won't admit it. They have a kind of war-of-the-sexes thing going on, where each one thinks that if they don't stand strong, the other one will walk all over them, because he/she doesn't listen, and if they don't win, they'll lose. Pro tip from someone who's been married going on 27 years: this is a terrible way to run a relationship. Very much how a lot of relationships were conducted at the time, though, with New Women starting to challenge masculine dominance. Unfortunately, it's never truly resolved, though there are hints by the end that they may have both learned something.
The denouement is thrilling and suspenseful, and even though Henry does (as I predicted) burst in and save Hilary at the psychological moment, she does something brave and effective first, so I didn't mind so much. I'd worked out how the crime was done some considerable time before it was laid out by Miss Silver, but the process of getting to the resolution was still enjoyable.
With the third book, Lonesome Road, the author finally seems to have got a sense of Miss Silver. In the first two books, she's a dowdy-looking middle-aged spinster who knits (typically for her stereotype), writes things down carefully in exercise books, and implausibly knows things about people by no clearly articulated mechanism. She's an archetype combined with a plot device. In this book, she suddenly develops a personality, rather a tart-but-kindly one, and we get to see inside her head, not least by seeing what it is she's writing in those books.
A wealthy woman with a large collection of family hangers-on (cousins and the like, mostly), who stand to inherit money from her, is receiving death threats and murder attempts, and asks Miss Silver to come and investigate, so we get to see her on site and active rather than largely in her consulting room. Things quickly become suspenseful, and everyone's a potential suspect, and there's a young woman also (one of the cousins) who seems to be in trouble and foolishly won't confide in Miss Silver.
It's an unusual detective story in that it's not solving a murder, but an attempted murder, and trying to prevent an actual murder (or, as it turns out, two murders), and the police never become involved, because Miss Silver's client won't set them on her relatives, no matter how awful those relatives may be. Also, (view spoiler) I didn't spot the would-be murderer at all, though Miss Silver's explanation makes total sense of why she did.
There's a small thread of continuity running through the three books, in that in both books 2 and 3, the person seeking Miss Silver's help has heard about her through the main character in the previous book. I wonder how far into the 32-book series this was sustained? I will probably find out, because after an unpromising start, this turned into a series I definitely want to continue with. It's a fortunate chance that I picked up the three-in-one from my library, because if I'd only read the first one, I might not have continued. The second was much better, and the third really good. Averaging them out, I'm putting this whole collection in the Silver tier of my annual best-of list, though the first would have been Bronze at best, and the third is knocking on the door of Gold.
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