If you drew a map of your world, what would it look like?

When I was in grad school, we participated in the exercise of drawing a map of our offices.* I chose to draw a map of my floor: my office was along the route to the lunch room, a high-traffic route that meant I got to say hello to a lot of people. If you walked down that hall** the other direction, you reached an intersection with another main route where people often ran into other people and had “oh, by the way…” conversations that ended up lasting 10 minutes and solving world peace. Further on, my hallway intersected with another hallway***, turning off to the right, you eventually passed the elevator bank (an important landmark because our building was so vertical that we spent much of our time meeting with people on other floors), eventually turning right at the COO’s corner office, passing then out through a secure door, through a small lobby, and into what I termed the “executive ghetto” because it was where all the VPs and their executives resided, isolated from the real work that was happening. The route continued on zigging and zagging until it emerged again on our side of the floor. But the execs only took this round-about route to the elevator when they had spent a noticeable amount of money on something, in which case they avoided the Scylla-and-Charybdis route that passed the COO’s office, where he sat, door open, and woe betide you when he saw you pass and called out, “Libby: what are you doing to me?” because then you had to stop and justify your spend.****

In Scales of Justice, the main character, a visiting nurse on a bicycle, pauses her journey at the top of a ridge overlooking the valley that contains the small community in which the mystery takes place. As she looks down on the gentle river valley, she pictures it as an illustrated map, very much like my office map. The gentle river bisects the frame and, along it’s shores, the homes of the people who will be victims and suspects in the book: the grand estate of the baronet’s family whose patriarch has watched over the people of the valley for generations, assisted in this generation by his wife, son, and grandson. The neighboring home of the retired Colonel Carterette, his second wife (married while he was stationed in the far east), and their ingenue daughter. Further downstream, the home of Commander Syce, another retired military man, who suffers with a drinking problem. And, finally, the home of an eccentric elderly man with a clowder of cats and a fishing addiction, made worse by the loss of his son who committed suicide after being accused of political treason while stationed abroad on diplomatic service with the baronet.

The river connects their lands and connects them all, in some way. The aristocrat’s wife overlooks the view and paints it. The young lovers meet and walk there in the dusk. The Chief Constable and the eccentric man both fish it’s shores. Commander Syce practices archery in the glades alongside the river. It sounds very peaceful and bucolic – and, indeed, even while people are dropping dead left and right, and it becomes invaded by the CID, the scenery continues to be described that way: peaceful, idyllic. This is Marsh at her best, in my mind: she describes a setting so vividly that, despite the murders that happen later, the landscape remains untouched. Many of her best books do this. Even in Surfeit of Lampreys – another of my favorites – which takes place almost entirely indoors and is more about the people than the place, the family’s apartment takes on a life of it’s own, a life that seems untouched by the family and that you sense will continue long after the chaotic family that inhabits it has moved on.

The other thing that stands out for me in this book is the romance. In mysteries of this time, it is usual to have a pair of young lovers: either they are secretly meeting, like this pair, who aren’t hiding their love, just not wanting to share it with their parents yet; or they meet in the course of the mystery and fall in love, saving each other at the end of the story. In this book, we do have those young lovers but the true love story is between the visiting nurse and the alcoholic Commander Syce. These are two stock characters in British books: the high-energy, annoyingly cheerful but credibly competent visiting nurse; and the bumbling alcoholic retired military man. And yet, they are the ones who fall in love in this book, they are the ones with the genuinely touching moments, with the arguments that are later made up. The young lovers seem pale and vapid by comparison, serving only to move the plot forward at key moments.

The mystery itself unfolds despite the efforts of the witnesses to conceal a shameful secret shared between the baronet’s family, the murder victim, and the eccentric neighbor with the cats: each concealing it for their own reasons having to do with honor. I thought the revelation of the secret was interesting – but I also thought it would have been made more interesting if Marsh had made one slight change which I won’t go into.

I have to say that the least interesting character in the book is Marsh’s hero. She wanted him to be a Gentlemen Detective, a member of the police force who is also, it is repeatedly emphasized, surprisingly of the aristocratic class (his elder brother is the one who will inherit, I believe). But she makes him such a darned gentleman, always saying and doing the correct thing and taking himself so seriously, that he has almost no personality at all. He doesn’t have the quirks of other younger brothers who go on to be independent detectives – Campion, Whimsey – with their capricious and impish qualities. That partly works for Marsh’s books, as Alleyn is so transparent that you look through him at the crime, seeing it through his eyes, instead of being distracted by his own quixotic behavior. But it’s hard to fall in love with him as a character. In later books, he loosens up a little, especially when you meet his mother, or when someone – often a Lamprey or sometimes his own son – forces him out of character. But I think the reason his wife starts to join him in the books is because she is someone you can sympathize with: she feels the emotion of the crime in a way that he rarely does.

If you want a mystery with a strong sense of place, and an unconventional love story, this is a good one.

What’s your favorite mystery of the golden age? What draws you to it? Share in the comments.

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^{*In my grad school, almost all of us were full-time, working professionals, that being a condition of admission, because they wanted us to bring in actual work situations to class, and apply what we were learning in class right away at work. That worked really well for me. Oh and don’t ask me why we were drawing maps of our offices; I can’t remember now although it was one of my favorite assignments. Possibly because we had just read an article about how space and location can effect team performance; think of the poor stapler-guy from Office Space with his desk beside the boiler.}

^{**Or whatever you call a hall when it has cubicles on one side, an aisle, perhaps.}

^{***A less-productive intersection. The people on that side of the building were quiet, studious introverts who kept their eyes on the spreadsheets. You never heard them chattering, while the rest of us were constantly bouncing ideas off each other and we instinctively lowered our voices when we traversed that hall, as if we were in a library. Although, in retrospect, they might disagree with our perception of lowered voices. My boss used to say that visiting my department was like visiting the back room in one of our stores – everyone was chatting, laughing, and also getting a remarkable amount of work done.}

^{****Quote: “The stores are the profit center; we are all just overhead.” Which, when you think about it, is accurate. And could have been said much more loudly and more often, to some corporate employees, who thought the company’s success was all about their genius and despite the efforts of the store employees.}