a host of heyers
Dec. 18th, 2023 04:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
portico Back in October I listened to an episode of Shedunnit which discussed Golden Age mysteries with a spooky slant and mentioned Footsteps in the Dark by Georgette Heyer. Like a lot of prolific romance readers, I primarily knew Heyer as the progenitor of the Regency genre, and hadn't much thought about her other work. But I love a country house and I was very in the mood for a spooky mystery (and, crucially, my library had it ready to borrow), so I read it. And then proceeded to read 8 additional Heyers. Here is my account of them.
I quickly learned that the pattern of Heyer mysteries goes: cast of rich and/or terrible people, mostly related. One of them will die, probably the one you expect. At least two people will fall in love over the course of the book, also the ones you expect. The character content will be rich, the mystery less so. Heyer was not interested in action or in seeing her culprit get their comeuppance (with a couple exceptions). Mostly, the culprit is either nabbed or decides to do The Honorable Thing and commits suicide entirely off-page. Do not read if you don't find comedies of manners entertaining.
Footsteps in the Dark (1932)
In 1932, Heyer was newly returned to England, pregnant, and with a husband out of work. She needed a payday, and fast. Ergo, she decided to write a thriller. Footsteps in the Dark follows a quartet of Bright Young Things--three siblings and one of their husbands--after they have come into possession of a late aunt's rambling country house and have decided to use it as a proper country residence. The problems with this plan are as follows: it's a wreck, everyone in the nearby village is convinced that it's haunted and tells them so at every opportunity, and there are two Suspicious Characters about. This book is, by weight, mostly banter. The dialogue is extremely Wodehousian, which I found delightful but could easily see wearing on people very quickly. There is a police detective in this one, but he is at odds with the family for most of the book, so the brother-in-law character does a lot of investigating (he is the first of Heyer's barrister-investigator). The final act of the book is a fun action sequence, and I found the culprit satisfying. It's about a quarter too long, all banter, but nevertheless A Good Time.
Why Shoot a Butler? (1933)
Terrible title. I can't read it without hearing it in Jerry Seinfeld's voice. Per Heyer's biographer, the original title of the book was "Half a Loaf" which is much better on a number of levels. This is my principal complaint about this book. Heyer was clearly still finding her feet writing thrillers, because there's a lot about this one that stands out compared to her subsequent books: the murder occurs before the book begins, there's an action sequence at the end (a car chase!), and we have as close as we'll come to a principle protagonist in Frank Amberley (another barrister-investigator). This is the one of Heyer's mysteries that feels the most like a Golden Age Mystery (TM) (which may be why it's my favourite of the lot), however the character of Amberley is pure Heyer. The man is Such a Bitch. Every conversation he has with someone includes them saying, often to his face, that he is just the worst. And it's true! He is <3. But as with the best of Heyer's awful men, he is so much fun. The romance in this one is between Amberley and a woman who also thinks he sucks, so if you enjoy that sort of thing (I do), you'll probably enjoy this one. If you're getting the sense from this summary that the death of the titular butler is something of a non-issue in the book, you are correct. It's really just Frank Amberley being a jerk and getting into folks' business. OH! Extremely honorable mention of Amberley's aunt, who is the best sort of dark horse.
The Unfinished Clue (1934)
This is the last Heyer before she fully settles into her formula, I think, mostly down to how central the romance is in it. However, it does feature a set-up which she will return to repeatedly: a house party in which the patriarch of the family Sucks and is Murdered. The primary sympathetic character is Dinah, sister-in-law of the victim, who manages to be both extremely fashionable and imminently pragmatic. Her romance is with the Scotland Yard detective called onto the case (this will be the last of Heyer's mysteries with a one-off detective), which is unique in her string of romances amongst the idle rich, but Harding skates by by virtue of being secretly a gentleman (everyone is surprised by this) and having gone to Oxford. However, the stand-out character here is Lola de Silva, who is Mexican, a cabaret performer, and the victim's son's Unacceptable Fiancée. She's fantastic. Her agent also makes an appearance the first of two Jewish characters in these books. This guy comes away with fairly minor antisemitism, primarily from the rich white characters. (The subsequent Jew is not so fortunate.)
My primary complaint about this book is a familiar one: SHOULDA BEEN QUEER. There's an older woman (her name escapes me!) who we are told is the victim's friend and the only woman he is interested in listening to--why! what was in it for this lady! I wanted to know more about her and I wanted her to seduce Dinah. For Harding, I wanted one of Heyer's terrible men--the role in this book played by Francis, the victim's nephew. The potential to turn this fairly by-the-numbers country house murder into something really fun was so close I could taste it. Someone reading this review please read this book and make this happen for me. Thank you.
Behold, Here's Poison (1936)
Here I must admit a sin: I skipped a book. The next book would have been Death in the Stocks, which is actually the only one of these I own in print. When I got to it in the order, I picked it up, saw that it didn't seem to take place in a big house, and skipped it. In doing so, I missed the first appearance of Heyer's recurring inspector characters. Mea culpa! I'll read it someday.
Okay. The poison book. I struggled with this book initially, because everybody in it sucks. However, eventually Randall took center stage and I had a blast. This is another one where the unpleasant patriarch dies. We never meet him, only his corpse. There's no house party, only a house packed with relations hoping for a piece of the pie. Everyone dislikes Randall, the victim's nephew and heir, because he is deeply unpleasant to them and doesn't care that they dislike him. In spite of this, for some reason, he is devoted to keeping his relatives out of jail. This has him working at odds with the detectives (Hannasyde and Hemmingway). We're seeing this from Hannasyde's POV, which is very, very fun. Heyer did a similar thing with Amberley in Butler, but because he was the POV character, he was keeping secrets from us. Randall is keeping secrets from H&H, and is very good at it, which is imminently more fun. The big disappointment in this one is the romance, which unfortunately is between Randall and his first cousin Stella. Even more unfortunately, Stella just. kinda sucks. I wanted someone smarter and more fun for Randall.
They Found Him Dead (1937)
Another day, another family in a country house with a dead patriarch. This one didn't suck, but he was the lynchpin in too many plans. He had to go. The best thing about this one imo was the setting, which was a foggy cliffside manor. I found the romantic leads (the family matriarch's hired companion and the victim's nephew) fairly boring--I think Heyer intended for their class separation to do the heavy lifting in terms of interest. The fun characters are Rosemary, a very dramatic gold-digger bride who exclaims about the demands of her "Russian blood," and Norma, who shows up halfway through the book after having returned from a hunting trip in Africa and is also running for parliament. Her extremely vague lord of a husband and their teenaged son, who is obsessed with American gangster movies are also very good. Inspectors H&H are back for this one, and they're fine! The culprit was very obvious, partly due to the fact that H&H are good detectives but they didn't seem to be spending much time on one specific person. Tell me more about the house, please.
A Blunt Instrument (1938)
Here we have another dead patriarch, although in this case he only left a sister and a nephew behind. This one takes place in a suburb of London, so at least H&H don't have as far to travel. Heyer does her best Peter & Harriet in this one, if Peter was somehow fused with Bertie Wooster. This is Neville, the victim's nephew, and Sally Drew, sister of a suspect and a mystery writer herself. Neville is very very fun, and Sally is a great match for him. This is one where too much information gives the game away, so I'll leave it at that except to say that there much worse antisemitism occurs herein.
No Wind of Blame (1939)
This one is FUN. Ok, plot stuff first: family in a country house, dead patriarch (only by virtue of having been married to the matriarch), H&H minus H on the scene (Hemingway is on his own now). Willy is the dead man and his wife is Ermyntrude, who was an actress before she married a rich man (her first husband). Everything in this book is framed in terms of theatrics. Ermyntrude is very dramatic yes, but even moreso is her daughter Vicky, who is always playing a Role (when you meet her she is in "Sport Girl" mode, and garbed accordingly). This is very tiresome for Willy's ward Mary, who is clearly supposed to be our sympathetic character, except that she's very boring and conventional. Vicky is much better. Mary's friend Hugh (who everyone expects her to marry) is also on the scene, and he finds himself surprisingly entertained by Vicky. By the end they're engaged and you have the sense that their sex life is gonna be wacky fun. There's also a prince present? Yeah. Great book.
Envious Casca (1941)
Stop me if you've heard this already: big house, dead patriarch, unpleasant cast of characters, mostly related to each other. This time, however, it's Christmas! I had mixed feelings about this one, mainly down to finding I liked the characters which Heyer seemed to dislike the most. The victim is portrayed as a miserly curmudgeon who argues with everyone and is forced into hosting a Christmas gathering. I liked him! I was sad when he died! I also loved Maud, the victim's sister-in-law, who is not interested in hosting a gathering, she is only interested in reading her biography of an Austrian empress and telling everyone about it. I wanted to like Paula, an actress with a one track mind set entirely to I Must Be Permitted To Do This Play but she wore on me. I did quite like Mathilda, the sympathetic character, and found her romance satisfying, if at times frustrating because Heyer clearly didn't want to give the game away too early by removing her intended as a serious suspect. All that said, it's one of the cleverer murders Heyer devised, and I enjoyed that a great deal.
Penhallow (1942)
This book....my nemesis. The new covers of Heyer's mysteries have a little golden logo at the top which reads "A Country House Mystery." Penhallow has one, implying that it's in the vein of Heyer's other mysteries. Penhallow is not that. It does feature a country house full of terrible people, largely related to one another, and a murder is committed, but there the similarities end. This is about the Penhallow family who live at Trevellin in Cornwall, which is most of them because the patriarch is obsessed with having as much of his family under his roof as possible, and making their lives a misery for his own amusement. It's unrelentingly cruel. I kept on because I was promised his death, hoping against hope that the two absent characters when they appeared would be my salvation. They were not. They were very clearly meant to be queer, but generally were just as miserable as the rest, and the murder, which it occurred, did so with the reader's full knowledge of the culprit, who then spends the rest of the book in agony watching the results of their action play out.
Heyer was convinced that this was going to be her Masterpiece, the thing she would be heralded for, which would finally gain her the unalloyed praise of her peers. She was obsessed with it. It ultimately disappointed her, and it definitely disappointed me. I will say, free now of its pages, that I can see it being the sort of thing you write when you've been putting out the sort of books Heyer was writing one a year for a decade and war is literally on your doorstep. It's not the sort of thing I'll ever knowingly choose to read again, but I can see how something like it comes into being.
I quickly learned that the pattern of Heyer mysteries goes: cast of rich and/or terrible people, mostly related. One of them will die, probably the one you expect. At least two people will fall in love over the course of the book, also the ones you expect. The character content will be rich, the mystery less so. Heyer was not interested in action or in seeing her culprit get their comeuppance (with a couple exceptions). Mostly, the culprit is either nabbed or decides to do The Honorable Thing and commits suicide entirely off-page. Do not read if you don't find comedies of manners entertaining.
Footsteps in the Dark (1932)
In 1932, Heyer was newly returned to England, pregnant, and with a husband out of work. She needed a payday, and fast. Ergo, she decided to write a thriller. Footsteps in the Dark follows a quartet of Bright Young Things--three siblings and one of their husbands--after they have come into possession of a late aunt's rambling country house and have decided to use it as a proper country residence. The problems with this plan are as follows: it's a wreck, everyone in the nearby village is convinced that it's haunted and tells them so at every opportunity, and there are two Suspicious Characters about. This book is, by weight, mostly banter. The dialogue is extremely Wodehousian, which I found delightful but could easily see wearing on people very quickly. There is a police detective in this one, but he is at odds with the family for most of the book, so the brother-in-law character does a lot of investigating (he is the first of Heyer's barrister-investigator). The final act of the book is a fun action sequence, and I found the culprit satisfying. It's about a quarter too long, all banter, but nevertheless A Good Time.
Why Shoot a Butler? (1933)
Terrible title. I can't read it without hearing it in Jerry Seinfeld's voice. Per Heyer's biographer, the original title of the book was "Half a Loaf" which is much better on a number of levels. This is my principal complaint about this book. Heyer was clearly still finding her feet writing thrillers, because there's a lot about this one that stands out compared to her subsequent books: the murder occurs before the book begins, there's an action sequence at the end (a car chase!), and we have as close as we'll come to a principle protagonist in Frank Amberley (another barrister-investigator). This is the one of Heyer's mysteries that feels the most like a Golden Age Mystery (TM) (which may be why it's my favourite of the lot), however the character of Amberley is pure Heyer. The man is Such a Bitch. Every conversation he has with someone includes them saying, often to his face, that he is just the worst. And it's true! He is <3. But as with the best of Heyer's awful men, he is so much fun. The romance in this one is between Amberley and a woman who also thinks he sucks, so if you enjoy that sort of thing (I do), you'll probably enjoy this one. If you're getting the sense from this summary that the death of the titular butler is something of a non-issue in the book, you are correct. It's really just Frank Amberley being a jerk and getting into folks' business. OH! Extremely honorable mention of Amberley's aunt, who is the best sort of dark horse.
The Unfinished Clue (1934)
This is the last Heyer before she fully settles into her formula, I think, mostly down to how central the romance is in it. However, it does feature a set-up which she will return to repeatedly: a house party in which the patriarch of the family Sucks and is Murdered. The primary sympathetic character is Dinah, sister-in-law of the victim, who manages to be both extremely fashionable and imminently pragmatic. Her romance is with the Scotland Yard detective called onto the case (this will be the last of Heyer's mysteries with a one-off detective), which is unique in her string of romances amongst the idle rich, but Harding skates by by virtue of being secretly a gentleman (everyone is surprised by this) and having gone to Oxford. However, the stand-out character here is Lola de Silva, who is Mexican, a cabaret performer, and the victim's son's Unacceptable Fiancée. She's fantastic. Her agent also makes an appearance the first of two Jewish characters in these books. This guy comes away with fairly minor antisemitism, primarily from the rich white characters. (The subsequent Jew is not so fortunate.)
My primary complaint about this book is a familiar one: SHOULDA BEEN QUEER. There's an older woman (her name escapes me!) who we are told is the victim's friend and the only woman he is interested in listening to--why! what was in it for this lady! I wanted to know more about her and I wanted her to seduce Dinah. For Harding, I wanted one of Heyer's terrible men--the role in this book played by Francis, the victim's nephew. The potential to turn this fairly by-the-numbers country house murder into something really fun was so close I could taste it. Someone reading this review please read this book and make this happen for me. Thank you.
Behold, Here's Poison (1936)
Here I must admit a sin: I skipped a book. The next book would have been Death in the Stocks, which is actually the only one of these I own in print. When I got to it in the order, I picked it up, saw that it didn't seem to take place in a big house, and skipped it. In doing so, I missed the first appearance of Heyer's recurring inspector characters. Mea culpa! I'll read it someday.
Okay. The poison book. I struggled with this book initially, because everybody in it sucks. However, eventually Randall took center stage and I had a blast. This is another one where the unpleasant patriarch dies. We never meet him, only his corpse. There's no house party, only a house packed with relations hoping for a piece of the pie. Everyone dislikes Randall, the victim's nephew and heir, because he is deeply unpleasant to them and doesn't care that they dislike him. In spite of this, for some reason, he is devoted to keeping his relatives out of jail. This has him working at odds with the detectives (Hannasyde and Hemmingway). We're seeing this from Hannasyde's POV, which is very, very fun. Heyer did a similar thing with Amberley in Butler, but because he was the POV character, he was keeping secrets from us. Randall is keeping secrets from H&H, and is very good at it, which is imminently more fun. The big disappointment in this one is the romance, which unfortunately is between Randall and his first cousin Stella. Even more unfortunately, Stella just. kinda sucks. I wanted someone smarter and more fun for Randall.
They Found Him Dead (1937)
Another day, another family in a country house with a dead patriarch. This one didn't suck, but he was the lynchpin in too many plans. He had to go. The best thing about this one imo was the setting, which was a foggy cliffside manor. I found the romantic leads (the family matriarch's hired companion and the victim's nephew) fairly boring--I think Heyer intended for their class separation to do the heavy lifting in terms of interest. The fun characters are Rosemary, a very dramatic gold-digger bride who exclaims about the demands of her "Russian blood," and Norma, who shows up halfway through the book after having returned from a hunting trip in Africa and is also running for parliament. Her extremely vague lord of a husband and their teenaged son, who is obsessed with American gangster movies are also very good. Inspectors H&H are back for this one, and they're fine! The culprit was very obvious, partly due to the fact that H&H are good detectives but they didn't seem to be spending much time on one specific person. Tell me more about the house, please.
A Blunt Instrument (1938)
Here we have another dead patriarch, although in this case he only left a sister and a nephew behind. This one takes place in a suburb of London, so at least H&H don't have as far to travel. Heyer does her best Peter & Harriet in this one, if Peter was somehow fused with Bertie Wooster. This is Neville, the victim's nephew, and Sally Drew, sister of a suspect and a mystery writer herself. Neville is very very fun, and Sally is a great match for him. This is one where too much information gives the game away, so I'll leave it at that except to say that there much worse antisemitism occurs herein.
No Wind of Blame (1939)
This one is FUN. Ok, plot stuff first: family in a country house, dead patriarch (only by virtue of having been married to the matriarch), H&H minus H on the scene (Hemingway is on his own now). Willy is the dead man and his wife is Ermyntrude, who was an actress before she married a rich man (her first husband). Everything in this book is framed in terms of theatrics. Ermyntrude is very dramatic yes, but even moreso is her daughter Vicky, who is always playing a Role (when you meet her she is in "Sport Girl" mode, and garbed accordingly). This is very tiresome for Willy's ward Mary, who is clearly supposed to be our sympathetic character, except that she's very boring and conventional. Vicky is much better. Mary's friend Hugh (who everyone expects her to marry) is also on the scene, and he finds himself surprisingly entertained by Vicky. By the end they're engaged and you have the sense that their sex life is gonna be wacky fun. There's also a prince present? Yeah. Great book.
Envious Casca (1941)
Stop me if you've heard this already: big house, dead patriarch, unpleasant cast of characters, mostly related to each other. This time, however, it's Christmas! I had mixed feelings about this one, mainly down to finding I liked the characters which Heyer seemed to dislike the most. The victim is portrayed as a miserly curmudgeon who argues with everyone and is forced into hosting a Christmas gathering. I liked him! I was sad when he died! I also loved Maud, the victim's sister-in-law, who is not interested in hosting a gathering, she is only interested in reading her biography of an Austrian empress and telling everyone about it. I wanted to like Paula, an actress with a one track mind set entirely to I Must Be Permitted To Do This Play but she wore on me. I did quite like Mathilda, the sympathetic character, and found her romance satisfying, if at times frustrating because Heyer clearly didn't want to give the game away too early by removing her intended as a serious suspect. All that said, it's one of the cleverer murders Heyer devised, and I enjoyed that a great deal.
Penhallow (1942)
This book....my nemesis. The new covers of Heyer's mysteries have a little golden logo at the top which reads "A Country House Mystery." Penhallow has one, implying that it's in the vein of Heyer's other mysteries. Penhallow is not that. It does feature a country house full of terrible people, largely related to one another, and a murder is committed, but there the similarities end. This is about the Penhallow family who live at Trevellin in Cornwall, which is most of them because the patriarch is obsessed with having as much of his family under his roof as possible, and making their lives a misery for his own amusement. It's unrelentingly cruel. I kept on because I was promised his death, hoping against hope that the two absent characters when they appeared would be my salvation. They were not. They were very clearly meant to be queer, but generally were just as miserable as the rest, and the murder, which it occurred, did so with the reader's full knowledge of the culprit, who then spends the rest of the book in agony watching the results of their action play out.
Heyer was convinced that this was going to be her Masterpiece, the thing she would be heralded for, which would finally gain her the unalloyed praise of her peers. She was obsessed with it. It ultimately disappointed her, and it definitely disappointed me. I will say, free now of its pages, that I can see it being the sort of thing you write when you've been putting out the sort of books Heyer was writing one a year for a decade and war is literally on your doorstep. It's not the sort of thing I'll ever knowingly choose to read again, but I can see how something like it comes into being.