The Abbey Court Murder

by Annie Haynes

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 217
Series: Inspector Furnival #1
Rating:

Synopsis:

“A crime of a peculiarly mysterious nature was perpetrated some time last night in a block of flats called Abbey Court.”

Lady Judith Carew acted furtively on the night of the Denboroughs’ party. Her secret assignation at 9:30pm was a meeting to which she took a loaded revolver. The Abbey Court apartment building would play host to violent death that very night, under cover of darkness. The killer’s identity remained a mystery, though Lady Carew had a most compelling motive – and her revolver was left in the dead man’s flat…

Enter the tenacious Inspector Furnival in the first of his golden age mysteries, first published in 1923. Though there are many clues, there are just as many red herrings and the case takes numerous Christie-esque twists before the murderer can be revealed.

Annie Haynes is a writer I hadn’t come across before, so I was quite interested to read her biography. I wonder why her books were forgotten so quickly? Perhaps in part it’s to do with the fact that she got quite severely ill quite young, and spent a lot of her time housebound. I was also interested to note that she moved in with a friend, Ada Heather-Bigg, and stayed there for years as a “guest”; one is definitely tempted to speculate about a romantic relationship between the two!

In any case, despite the comparisons to Christie, I do think Haynes was a slightly better writer, though The Abbey Court Murder does have quite the share of melodrama (e.g. a child falling conveniently ill just at the moment it heightens tension, and lots of fainting and so on) — to me her characters felt a bit more real, though that’s partly because she focuses more on that than the mystery.

The mystery itself was relatively obvious from the clues, some of which I think were maybe given a little too early if it was supposed to be hanging onto the tension of what evidence might arise to exonerate the main couple. We don’t see a lot of the process of solving, so most of the tension relies on the characters waiting breathlessly, believing themselves to be doomed, and that’s helped along when there’s less explanation of the detective’s methods.

Overall, it’s not 100% to my taste, but I did enjoy it, and I’d try more of Haynes’ work!

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)