Literate British Mystery

Words for Murder Perhaps – Edward Candy

This 1971 mystery stars a modest professor of English literature, with the main backdrop of evening classes for adult education. It sounds like a yawn but this is in fact a short enjoyable read.

Our hero Gregory “Rob” Roberts has a past. His wife ran off with his best friend, a poet and scholar. Poor Rob made an attempt on his own life and spent a couple months in a rest home. As the story begins, the icy Audrey, Greg's ex-wife, receives in the mail an anonymous note that is quoting a poetic elegy. Since Rob is a literary guy, she assumes he sent it, to mock her over the disappearance of the best friend.

She reports the disappearance and the note to the authorities and thoughtfully mentions her literary ex-husband. Sure enough Rob is questioned by the police, well characterized not as ominous bullies but as serious professionals getting on with the job.

But to add to Rob’s troubles a famous professor of Egyptology is poisoned after his lecture at the school. Another poetic elegy is found. And then two more murders occur, both with poetic elegies.

Inspector Burnivel of the Yard is called in, whom readers might recall from the 1954 mystery Which Doctor. Not above other cozy elements of the genre, the author sets up a romance for Rob, unwraps red herrings, and details a scam.

The mystery is ingenious, the language highly literate. As for characterization, it’s nice to read about grown-ups in adult situations acting about as wisely as we could expect. The author was not only a writer in the genre but a fan of mysteries, too, making allusions to Wilkie Collins, Agatha Christie, Michael Innes, and Michael Gilbert. In his course on Crime Fiction, Rob argues:

We are not usually asked, in the classic detective story, to feel with the characters, to identify, only to perform a feat of the intellect ...We don't want, we positively fear, to have our delight sullied by any appreciable concern for victim or suspect Hence the number of mysteries where the crime has already been committed before the start of the narrative, or where the victim is a wicked person for whom no real sympathy need be felt .... The essence of the detective story is that it will tease and even frighten us a little but it won't upset or anger us.

Recommended.