Fire in the Thatch, E.C.R. Lorac

This book begins by establishing the character of a little Devonshire farming area, and a young man who comes to settle there and work on the land after having to leave the army before the end of the Second World War. He’s a quiet man, but conscientious, with a love of hard work for the right purpose. The first couple of chapters establish that he’s well thought of, that he gets along with his neighbours, and his efforts on the small piece of land and cottage he leases are painstaking and well done.

In the fourth chapter or so, however, it jumps to a police inquiry into this man’s death. It looks like an accident, but the carelessness that would allow such an accident seems unlike the man, and it also seems unlikely that he — trained as a Navy man — would sleep through the fire to be burnt alive in his cottage. People are reluctant to believe that it could be murder, but likewise find it difficult to square the idea of him being careless… and Macdonald (Lorac’s series detective, though he doesn’t have much characterisation from book to book — they can be read in any order) is inclined to agree that there’s something strange going on.

As in Lorac’s other books, the order of the day is slow careful detection: speaking to the people involved, checking up on all the details, and piecing together the larger picture. It takes a while to come into focus, but it all comes together beautifully — and damn, this one is sad, because the victim sounds like a genuinely lovely person who was just trying to make a life ready for the woman he loved.

Each of Lorac’s books has a great sense of place and atmosphere, and while this one is quieter than her London-based books, the same applies here. You can almost smell the earth. It’s beautifully done.

Rating: 4/5

Murder by Matchlight, E.C.R. Lorac

This is one of the British Library Crime Classics, and I think one of the better ones in some ways. Lorac is really good with invoking at atmosphere, and this one has the fear and feverish activity of London during the Blitz down so pat you can feel it. Some of the scenes in the darkness gave me… not quite a shiver, because they weren’t exactly creepy, but a breathless suspenseful feeling, and she really makes the most of that. She also uses that mid-war setting to shape the story: things are possible because of the darkness, because of the deaths, because of encounters in air raid shelters…

It’s not stunningly original, and it gets a little tortuous in avoiding really clueing you in as to who committed the murder, but when everything unfolds and the mystery’s all told, it hangs together well and you’re a little relieved that the likable characters come out of it okay. At some points it does actually genuinely conjure up a little anxiety about that: things look so bad for them, maybe they’ll be hauled off to jail… Though the detective is also intelligent, which alleviates that some.

Definitely good enough that I had no hesitation about picking up the rest of the republished books by Lorac! It’s not brilliant, but it’s exactly that kind of comfortable I expect from the British Library Crime Classics.

Rating: 3/5

The Red House Mystery, A.A. Milne

It seems weird that the author of Winnie-the-Pooh also wrote a fairly classic murder mystery, complete with amateur detective and his Watson, but there you go. Antony, the amateur detective, shows up more or less coincidentally at the Red House because his friend Bill is staying there, only to find himself immediately involved in the finding of a body, the brother of the home’s owner. The owner of the house is missing, and his faithful cousin/solicitor/man-of-all-work Cayley holds down the fort while the police investigate, obligingly dragging the pond and searching the railways for the missing man. But Antony’s very observant, and can replay in his mind everything that happened, and he notices a few inconsistencies…

It’s one of those stories where I quickly jumped to some conclusions that turned out to be right, but had to wait for the story to work itself out to figure out why it was right. There was some witty dialogue and the mystery isn’t bad, but it’s not one that will stick in my mind. I find that having finished it just yesterday, there’s not that much to say about it. It was okay, and the detective was okay, and I rather liked Milne’s introduction explaining quite firmly that he had written the kind of detective story he thought was worth reading (no forensics, just cool deduction!). I think the forensics can actually add a whole extra line of misdirection under skilled hands, and don’t need to exclude the reader from understanding, so I disagree with him — but it’s an interesting perspective.

Anyway, overall not impressed, but it was fun enough while I was reading it.

Rating: 3/5