The Complete Mrs Pargeter Crime Mysteries 1–8 by
Simon Brett
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
This is an updating of the Golden Age mystery for the late, rather than early, 20th century (and into the 21st). The first book was published in 1986, and the rest intermittently through to almost the present day, but there's considerable time distortion which means that the events proceed, and the characters age, much more slowly than technology advances.
I thought I vaguely remembered a TV version of it, but apparently I was mistaken. Simon Brett, the author, is a BBC radio producer, who has produced several shows I've listened to, and that may have been where I got that idea.
Overall, I enjoyed the books, despite the unlikeliness and the spoiled protagonist. "Spoiled protagonist" is a technical term I use for protagonists who are narrated as too perfect and are constantly handed everything they need, whenever they need it, sometimes at the expense of lesser characters. At least in this book the spoiling has an explanation: Mrs Pargeter is the widow of a criminal mastermind who was highly respected by his extensive network of specialists, many of whom he specifically instructed to look after her after his death. Still, not only is Mrs P. very comfortable with herself, but the narration shares her admiration of her own perfections, and judges the lesser people around her unmercifully while never casting even a fragment of shade on Mrs P. Also, the author has his hand on the scales in her favour more than once, including giving her devices that apparently work by magic.
The following reviews of the individual books were mostly written immediately after reading them and before going on to the next book.
Book 1,
A Nice Class of Corpse, is set in a private hotel inhabited by a number of elderly people. Mrs Pargeter, aged 67 and five years widowed, joins them, and then (by the kind of coincidence that cosy mystery abounds with) the murders start. The late and genuinely lamented Mr Pargeter, it's clearly implied but never outright stated, made considerable money in illegal enterprises, and his widow calls on the expert advice of a couple of his old associates to help her in solving the crimes.
Mrs Pargeter is self-assertive to a carefully calculated degree, never pushy or rude, just good at cheerfully getting her own way and ignoring social convention if it happens not to suit her. I enjoyed her encounters with the uptight hotel proprietor immensely.
I spotted the first red herring - it seemed far too obvious far too early on - but the second red herring fooled me completely, in a way I enjoyed and applauded. The murderer keeps a diary, and we get extracts from the diary interspersed with the narrative, which ramps up the tension. A very slight cheat: The style of the diary is neutral and generic, so it gives no hints in that way to the identity of the murderer, even though most of the suspects have their own style of speaking to some degree. I can explain it away as the difference between spoken and written language, or the difference between an outward persona and the true thoughts of the person.
At the end of the book, Mrs Pargeter decides this isn't the place she wants to live, and moves on.
Four stars.
In book 2,
Mrs, Presumed Dead, we start to get a sense of the formula. As is usually the case in cozy mysteries, another murder happens to occur in Mrs Pargeter's vicinity, this time in the house she buys in a yuppie enclave - before she even moves into it. A key clue happens to have got stuck down behind the radiator, and she happens to find it because a piece of paper she's written something on also falls down into the same place.
We get further instances of Mrs Pargeter calling on her late husband's underworld contacts. His address book is essentially Felix the Cat's bag of tricks: it can produce any expertise she requires at the time. The criminals, most of whom have now gone straight, never fail to say that they'll always be grateful to Mr Pargeter, and that he told them before he died to look after her if she ever needed anything.
Through all of this, she gets a pretty good outline of the motive for the murder, and is reasonably sure that one has been committed. She uses one of her husband's contacts to confirm this (not a spoiler, because the first scene we get in the book is right after the murder has been committed, from the deliberately shadowy POV of the murderer), and reluctantly and anonymously tips off the police. Their investigation somehow fails to turn up the fact that she's already been everywhere they're looking. We don't get names or even much description of the investigating officers, and we certainly don't get their point of view; they're a means to an end, and Mrs Pargeter puppets them remotely.
The small group of six executive houses in commuting distance to London is a hotbed of dirty secrets, meaning everyone has a motive for the murder. This is pretty much in line with the Golden Age detective playbook. The specifics of the small-minded characters and their secrets have changed in 50 or 60 years, but the general feel is similar.
Once again, as in the first book, Mrs Pargeter is herself in danger from the murderer before the book ends, and then decides that this isn't the place she wants to live, and prepares to move on.
I make it sound like I didn't enjoy it, but I did. It is clearly settling into a formula, though, and I'm not sure I'll continue to love the formula through eight books unless it gets changed up a bit.
Still four stars, but the last one is a bit smaller.
Book 3, Mrs Pargeter's Package, is set mostly in Greece, where Mrs P has gone on holiday with a recently widowed friend whose late husband did... something vague and possibly suspicious, not that Mrs P can fault her for that. Of course there's a murder (
(view spoiler)[the victim is the friend (hide spoiler)]), and of course Mrs P investigates, and of course she receives abundant help from several people with special talents who recite the now familiar liturgy about what a great man her late husband was, how he helped the person immensely, and how he told them to look after his widow when he was gone, and of course anything she needs will be at no charge.
This time, when Mrs P is in danger at the end, she's saved by an almost literal deus ex machina, which conveniently dispenses justice at the same time, meaning she doesn't need to involve the police at all. (There is a policeman involved, but he's covering up the murder, not trying to solve it.)
There's a red herring which stretched my suspension of disbelief considerably. Don't click on the spoiler unless you really want a spoiler.
(view spoiler)[If your twin brother tried to murder you and you escaped by unspecified means to Britain - presumably with the help of your dying father, whose photograph has secret writing on the back of it indicating he knew what had happened, but not specifically enough to explode the red herring - why would you take that brother's name in your new identity? It seems to be done solely for reader-confusion purposes, not because it's something anyone would actually do. (hide spoiler)]The minor characters continue to be caricatures who are looked down upon from the lofty height of the flawless Mrs Pargeter (if you don't count recklessness as a flaw). The narration is all in close third person from her POV, but in a couple of places there's a lot more detail about the doings of these minor characters than a not-particularly-interested observer could plausibly gather from overhearing their conversations.
This one drops to three stars. If the fourth book isn't better, I'm out.
Book 4, Mrs Pargeter's Pound of Flesh: OK, it's improved somewhat. To support another friend whose husband is inside (except when he slips out to visit her, with no apparent difficulty), Mrs P joins the friend in a country manor converted into a slimming spa. There's some pretty fierce satire on the slimming industry and the way it depends on making women feel bad about their bodies; Mrs P is notable for feeling good about her (generously proportioned) body, so it doesn't affect her, but it messes up her friend. Meanwhile, there's something dodgy going on which involves the suspected murder of an innocent Cambridge University student, the definite murder of a staff member at the spa, and apparently unfinished business from Mr Pargeter's past. I saw two of the "twists" coming half a mile off, but there is some suspense (Mrs P gets into danger again, though in a way that's somewhat comedic, and is rescued by someone who shouldn't have known where she was), and by conveniently forgetting about the potential consequences for one of her friends that have prevented justice being done earlier, justice is done.
It's still a bit hinky, but the three stars are edging towards a fourth this time, and I'm happy to carry on.
Book 5, Mrs Pargeter's Plot: The builder Mrs P is employing to build her dream home, who is of course one of her late husband's many associates, is stitched up for a murder he didn't commit, and Mrs P needs to find the real culprit in order to get him back on the job (and back to his wife, who has heavily lacquered copper hair and exquisitely bad taste in interior decorating, but doesn't deserve to have her husband in jail for something he didn't do). Complicating the situation is another ex-con who has had a kind of conversion experience while inside, and is now trying to make restitution to people he had previously wronged - but because he's extremely thick and has an odd angle on life, and is also trying to prove that he's developed a sense of humour (he hasn't), the unlikely ways in which he does this (using who knows what resources) cause more problems for the recipients of his misguided "help". It's a good source of humour; he may not be able to tell a joke competently, but he is himself a good joke, as long as you're not the one he's gifting with something wildly inappropriate and the opposite of helpful.
The humour takes it back up to four stars, and this time it doesn't take shortcuts to get through its plot.
Book 6, Mrs Pargeter's Point of Honour: For the first time in the series, Mrs P is living in the same situation as in the previous book, in a fancy hotel in London owned by another of her husband's many grateful former proteges. Instead of solving a murder, this time she's paying off a debt of honour, a promise her husband made to the widow of another of his crew. She has to return a bunch of stolen paintings to the people and institutions they were stolen from, without bringing the name of the deceased thief into disrepute. By the end of the book, there's also an element of revenge against some people who deserve punishment, not just for things they did but for things they planned to do.
There are clues in this one (from the technology references) that the timeline is slipping around. The first book was published in 1986, and implicitly took place then. At that point, Mr P had been dead about 5 years, if I remember correctly. This one was published in 1998, and Mr P has still been dead about 5 years, so only about a year at most has passed, but the technology referenced as having been used when he was alive is the technology of five years before 1998, not five years before 1986.
It continues to be highly unlikely and full of colourful characters, which is fun. There's an incompetent police inspector who is brilliantly portrayed. It feels a lot more like a heist (or reverse heist, in some respects), and I enjoy heists, so this one gets an easy four stars.
The timeline really becomes unanchored in Book 7, Mrs Pargeter's Principle. It was published in 2015, and again the technology references clearly tell us that we're in 2015. Several years have passed - Mrs P is now finally living in the house that was being slowly built in
Mrs Pargeter's Plot, and has been for a little while, and Mr P has now been dead for "some years". But she's certainly not 29 years older than she was in the book published in 1986, which would make her 95; her age isn't specified, but it doesn't seem to be more than early 70s at the most.
Again, we're not solving a murder, but tidying up some unfinished business of Mr Pargeter's, some of it out of duty (looking after the daughter of a recently deceased former employee who'd deliberately dropped off the radar), some more out of curiosity (why, when Mrs P attends the funeral of someone whose name was in her husband's contact book but who none of his old colleagues seem to remember, is she warned off with threats from talking to the widow?) There are a couple of twists, but the main one is pretty obvious, and only by carrying the idiot ball do Mrs P's crew not tumble to it much earlier. Technology plays a significant role, including a completely implausible invention that causes zips (any zip, no preparation required, and no mechanism of any kind suggested) to drop when a remote control is pointed at them and activated. Also, there are magic numbers which, when entered into alarm systems or computers, bypass the need to know a password. Despite the many highly implausible elements and the obvious twist, it's a fun ride. Four stars, though the fourth one is maybe a bit small.
Book 8, Mrs Pargeter's Public Relations, is completely ridiculous and highly predictable, and receives three stars without the option of a fine. We also get more lazy, villainous Greek people, as in Book 2. There's another magic remote control, this one capable of opening (and subsequently closing) any padlock, regardless of whether it's a combination lock, an electronic lock, or an ordinary key lock, and once again there's no hint of how it works (because it breaks several laws of physics and the basic way that mechanisms work). Likewise with the magic software that Mrs P's hacker friend develops, which can somehow delete offline backups as well as the files on the computers she's actually hacked into. Both of these are well beyond implausible.
And, of course, once she has a magic padlock opener, every lock Mrs P encounters that she needs to get through is suddenly a padlock. The author tilts the playing field thoroughly to her advantage throughout, even when it's unnecessary, such as when by "serendipity" (authorial fiat) someone she was about to call calls her and spares her the slight trouble.
Mrs P is in danger twice.
(view spoiler)[The first time, the magic remote saves her; there is an amusing, if entirely improbable, scene in which, having hidden it in her bra for absolutely no reason except that the author knew it was going to be needed, she maneuvers it with her substantial breasts to point it in the right direction and then activate it. Once out of the situation, she returns it to her handbag, where she usually carries it, because it won't be needed again. The second time, in a huge forest covering a couple of thousand acres, two of her friends turn up by complete coincidence to the exact place she's in at just the right moment to save her. Her detective friend Truffler Mason is also in danger at one point, and the only person in the world who can save him is fortunately on hand to do so. (hide spoiler)]I saw the "twists" (including the second rescue) all coming a mile off, and correctly predicted well in advance of the revelations not only what crime was being committed but exactly what they were
(view spoiler)[smuggling. It's uranium pellets, which appear to do no harm either to the cats in whom they are implanted or Mrs Pargeter, who conceals some in her bra; the words "radiation poisoning" are never mentioned. (hide spoiler)]The series continues with two further books. My library has them, and I might read them at some point, even though so many of the books feature ridiculous plot devices, the "twists" are often patently obvious and the main character is overly perfect and given far too much authorial help. The average is a very low four or quite a high three stars; if the writing mechanics weren't so good I would be harsher.
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