Inspector Henry Tibbett #12

Note: The unfortunate title of this murder mystery refers to the main characters, a black ambassador and his white wife who is the victim of a shooting. But the author makes clear in this 1975 story that she does not endorse the attitudes mouthed by some characters. In a typically smooth sentence Moyes has a character make a crack and then, “having packed the maximum possible snobbery, bigotry and lack of tact into one short sentence, she ran out of the room.”

Black Widower – Patricia Moyes

Diplomatic spouses usually have the refined manners of upper middle class people, but not so for the wife of the ambassador to the US of the newly independent Caribbean country of Tampica. Where would Mavis – blonde, gorgeous, loves parties and shopping – learned manners in the modeling agencies and music halls of London?

Love overcomes color prejudice and social qualms, however. Law student and later lawyer Edward Ironmonger marries Mavis, despite the opposition of Mavis’ racist parents and the consternation of his friends and supporters who think he’s throwing his future prospects away by marrying a low-class dummy who doesn’t know how to help him socially and politically as a diplomatic spouse should and must.

On top of this, recall it’s 1975. So socially and politically it’s a strain when a black Ambassador with a white wife is posted to the southern city of Washington D.C. Moyes has a Dixiecrat senator and his wife Magnolia (of course) express sentiments that I, a college sophomore that fall, can testify were totally in keeping with the time.

At a diplomatic celebration of Tampica’s opening its embassy, poor Mavis makes a fool of herself and is ushered to her room. She is found shot dead. Ironmonger exercises dip privileges (an embassy is that country’s territory) and calls in a British police officer to investigate. Inquires reveal that the persons of interest have personal, social, and political motives galore.

So the reason to read this mid-Seventies mystery is that Moyes was a master at blending excellent settings with brilliant characterization and plausible unfolding of incidents. Moyes moved to the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean archipelago in the 1970s, so her descriptions of tropical lushness ring true. She must have moved in diplomatic circles because her set-piece of a dip party in D.C. rang true with me, who lived for three years on the fringes of the dip world in a European capital.

Like her other traditional police procedurals, this novel stars her series dynamic duo Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Henry Tibbet and his wife Emmy. Extremely relatable is this pleasant middle-aged couple who are down to earth but solve murders with no-nonsense English composure.