If I were Inspector Alleyn, I might reconsider my marriage because his wife, Troy Alleyn, always seems to be dragging him into murder investigations. I know she doesn’t mean to – she doesn’t like murder. It makes her uncomfortable, to say the least. And yet, somehow, there she is, taking a barge vacation without Alleyn, or painting someone’s picture, and there it is – suddenly a murder and she’s by herself and Alleyn comes to support her, and then the local police see an opportunity to see a master at work or dump a politically sticky case on him so they can focus on a convenient series of break-in’s or a riot or something.

And there Alleyn is, stuck with another insane case, in this instance, in the middle of nowhere, in the midst of a winter storm.

So annoying.

And Alleyn shows his annoyance.

In this case, Alleyn is out of the country on business and Troy has accepted a commission to paint a portrait of an honored antiquarian, Hilary Bill-Tasmin¹, whose father – when he went bankrupt – joined forces with a rag-picker (a second-hand salesman) and managed to turn his fortunes around selling off family heirlooms. By that time, Hilary’s mother had died, and Hilary was learning the business at his father’s knee. At this point, Hilary’s uncle and aunt step in, scoop him up, and whisk him off to grow up in their home, with frequent visits back to the East End where his father and the father’s business partner reside. Upon graduating with a fancy degree in antiquities, Hilary rejoins the business and drives it to a success his father (now dead) and the business partner (still alive, and now Hilary’s partner) could only have dreamed of.

Hilary then purchased the family home which had left the family several generations ago and has gone to ruin, rescues and renovates it, making it a show piece, despite its remote location just off the Dartmoor moors and just over a ridge from a high-security prison. Having built his show-piece, he needed people to care for it, and live-in servants are so expensive these days (early 1970s), he isn’t quite sure how he will manage – until he comes up with a brilliant plan.

One-time murderers, he reflects, are easily rehabilitated, and often have a wide range of useful skills besides. He manages to locate a chef who is an ailurophile who took exception to a man who made advances to him and also talked about torturing cats²; a talented gardener who managed to accidentally lock the lady he worked for in a garden shed filled with pesticides³; a butler who had been a prestigious head-waiter until he killed his wife and her lover who had rubbed their affair in his face; a householder who had a talent for engineering contraptions, and used that talent to set up a booby trap that took out a burglar⁴; and a man who, for some reason, decided a prostitute was a fallen woman and smote her down.⁵

Hilary manages to locate these candidates and secure their services, providing them a job to go to, once released. And, to Troy’s unpracticed eye, all seems to be going well – until the rest of the Christmas party arrives: the aunt, the uncle, the uncle’s faithful batman (who served him in the war), Hilary’s fiancée (and the uncle’s ward, whom he took responsibility for after her father died saving his life in Germany), and Hilary’s business partner. They are all, more or less vocally, disapproving of Hilary’s staff.

And, pretty quickly after they arrive, anonymous letters and strange occurrences begin to happen. Troy suffers a small booby trap, not dangerous just annoying; Hilary’s partner’s evening nightcap is “poisoned” with soap; and etc. until every one of the murderers is implicated. Hilary can’t be bothered worrying about that, however, for on Christmas Day he has invited all of the local children and their parents to his home, and he has to arrange for Father Christmas – in the person of his uncle and a great deal of costume, wigs, beards, and makeup applied by his fiancée – to march from his front door around the outside of the house and in through the french doors of the room where the Christmas tree resides and hand out gifts.

All seems to go off magically – until the fiancée reveals that the uncle had a last-minute problem with his heart (nothing much, just off to bed with his nitroglycerin) and the uncle’s faithful man stepped in at the last minute as Father Christmas. But then the faithful man disappeared, and they can’t find him anywhere, a blizzard descends, and he’s the only guy with the key to the uncle’s trunk that he carries with him everywhere, filled with money, stock, wills, jewels, and etc.

After a night of wet and muddy search, Troy receives a phone call: Alleyn has gotten home early and would like to know – is she coming home or should he come there? Before she can answer, Hilary steps in and presses an irrefutable invitation, Alleyn shows up and the local police hand the case over to him.

It’s lucky for Troy that he loves her so much. I might be saying to her, Hey, maybe next time I have to go out of town, don’t leave home. Or let anyone inside. Or maybe just stay in bed the whole time.

Often, in mystery novels, Christmas is seen as an annoyance, a lot of fuss over nothing. In this one, however, Christmas is presented as a magical event. The uncle loves dressing up as Father Christmas, and the way Hilary stages it is impressive. This is a particular subgenre of mystery: the isolation mystery, where the suspects are trapped in a remote country house in the winter, trapped by a storm, with clues often consisting of a wide expanse of snow, unmarked by footprints.

Totally worth a read. I think I’ve probably read this one at least 20 times.

1. In this case, Hilary is a man. The British do that. I wish we could return the favor, like say William is a woman’s name or something, just to confuse them. Here, it’s just a name. Not like Sarah Caudwell’s use of the name, which she manages to do for four books, four, without revealing whether Hilary is a woman or a man. That’s commitment to a concept. Sarah Caudwell’s work is awesome and hilarious. Check it out. ↩︎
2. The chef, whose name is Cooke, is homosexual. The advances were unwanted not because they were homosexual but because he didn’t care for the man making the advances. ↩︎
3. Intentionally filled – he was trying to eliminate pests and didn’t see her there. ↩︎
4. What probably drove the nail into the householder’s coffin was his anger that the police were mad at him instead of the man who had been breaking the law by breaking into his home. ↩︎
5. He served time in a mental institution, showed remorse, and was released. I don’t buy this “theory” that oncers are indeed oncers – and I buy this one the least. ↩︎