The Watersplash by Patricia Wentworth

The Watersplash is one of Patricia Wentworth’s mysteries starring Miss Maud Silver, a former governess, and present-day private detective. How old is she? And what year is this all happening?

I assumed this was an early work, and the “the War” was World War One. Miss Silver’s flat is
“Victorian”, full of curvy occasional tables, with peacock-blue curtains. “Victorian chairs with their spreading laps, their bow legs, their yellow walnut arms, their acanthus-leaf carving. From the walls engravings of some of her favourite pictures gazed down upon the congenial scene – Hope, by G. F. Watts, Sir John Millais’ Black Brunswicker, Landseer’s Stag at Bay.” Here it is explained that she has inherited the furniture. This interior is from the 1880s – how old is Miss Silver?

I checked the date of the novel, and it’s 1951. I had to quickly change the characters’ dresses and hairstyles to the frumpy get-ups of the early 50s. Would Susan wear her fair hair in a “bob”? More likely a flat pudding-basin.

Miss Silver at one point wears an olive cashmere dress (we can imagine a style old-fashioned for the 50s) with a “high, boned collar” and a “lace modesty vest”. High boned collars are from the late 19th century (Anne of Green Gables scandalises her neighbours by wearing a “collarless dress” circa 1900.) And if Miss Silver is wearing such a collar, how does the modesty vest – a piece of lace to fill in your neckline – fit in? Later she’s described as “this dowdy little person in her family album clothes”.

The proprietress of the village shop moans that everything is different now. You can’t get proper furniture polish. “Nothing’s the same as what it used to be, nor won’t be again.” Another older lady complains of “the increasing lack of manners amongst the young”. Plus ça change!

Another middle-aged woman wears clothes 30 years out of date (that makes them from the 1920s – they’d look shapeless and frumpy to the young). She is often found darning her wardrobe tightly in unyielding wool. She also “pokes” her head forward – something we were warned against as children.

A young woman is described: The girl was dressed a little too smartly. Neither the cut nor the material was good enough to produce the effect which had obviously been aimed at... She belonged to the class, so numerous in any large town, who endeavour to satisfy their social ambitions by wearing a cheap copy of the latest mode. She throws herself at one of the few eligible young men – odd, since he has been disinherited.

The mystery involves wills, and the murders take place at the sinister “watersplash”, a ford over a stream that’s unlit at night. Lovers of complex puzzles may be disappointed, but the writing is good, and rises to heights at times. Plus the social observations are pertinent and pungent.

“The coming in of a new fashion of farming or a new breed of cattle, accepted sometimes after long doubt and debate, more often rejected and remembered as somebody’s ‘Folly’.”

“Miss Mildred opined that Susan was headstrong, and they had a very cosy little talk about some other defects in her character.” Another girl is dismissed as “flighty”.

However, I’m not sure you can remove your own fingerprints from a sheet of paper... And Wentworth manages to include the cliché about the “thin veneer of civilisation”: What a superstitious creature man was! Civilized? The veneer was pitifully thin.

A good read, though. I don’t miss afternoon tea, especially when the brew was weak and tepid, and the "butter" margarine.

The Watersplash has been reviewed by Clothes in Books. Fortunately I picked out different costume details.

A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie

A Murder Is Announced gives a snapshot of life among the bourgeoisie in a small country town just after the war. Characters struggle with rationing of fuel and food, and the assistance of the local “lady help” or the temperamental cook from “Mittel Europa”.

The plot centres on the inhabitants of Little Paddocks, home of elderly Letitia Blacklock; her companion Dora Bunner; two young cousins, Patrick and Julia; a lodger, Philippa, who’s working as a gardener; and Mitzi the cook. One morning everyone in the village receives an invite to a “murder”, and the complicated story unfolds.

Despite the perils of living in Mayhem Parva, there is a lot of humour scattered about. The vicar’s wife explains it’s easier to clean a large room: “In a small one your behind keeps getting in the way of the furniture!”. An elderly gardener holds forth on fake jewellery and “Roman pearls” (it’s a clue). Mrs Swettenham complains about the way everybody is breeding Dachshunds now. What happened to good old Manchester Terriers? Other belittled modern fashions include “psychological jargon” and “atom research stations”. Mrs Swettenham, who resembles Mrs Nickleby, complains that they shouldn’t be built near people as “the radioactivity might get loose”. There’s a sympathetic portrayal of a lesbian couple who address each other as “Hinchcliffe” and “Murgatroyd”.

Two Golden Age clichés make an appearance: Nobody reads Tennyson any more, and the shifty gaze is the one that aims straight for your eyes, unblinking.

But really, was Agatha Christie anti-Semitic? I’ve defended her in the past, but in this book there is a character who is “coded” as Jewish, for whom nobody has a good word. She's treated as a figure of fun.

This is Mitzi, the “temperamental foreign help”. Everyone calls her a liar. (Though this could be Christie’s cleverness. Can Mitzi be believed after all?). She wears her hair in “greasy” dark plaits, and sports a bright purple jersey with a jade-green skirt – “not becoming to her pasty complexion”. Despite the plaits, sometimes her hair is “tousled” and “falls over her eyes”. She claims to have an economics degree, though she’s a very good cook.
                
Mitzi is disturbed by the murder announcement and foretells dire consequences. (Literary foreshadowing, of course.)                

‘Yes, I am upset,’ said Mitzi dramatically. ‘I do not wish to die! Already in Europe I escape. My family they all die—they are all killed—my mother, my little brother, my so sweet little niece—all, all they are killed. But me I run away—I hide. I get to England. I work. I do work that never—never would I do in my own country—I—’
                
Later she says that her brother was shot before her eyes. The English characters can’t seem to take all this on board. They must know – Patrick was in the army – that such things happened. But to them it is just Mitzi’s “lies” and exaggerations. Miss Blacklock explains this to Inspector Craddock, though she does add “But in spite of it all, I really am sorry for her.” This is about the only nice thing anybody says about Mitzi in the entire book.
                
During the first murder, orginally thought to be a joke, Mitzi gets shut in the dining room and screams when the lights go out. “A touch of comedy was introduced by the fact that she had been engaged in cleaning silver and was still holding a chamois leather and a large fish slice.” Edmund Swettenham slaps her to stop her screaming. Patrick later remarks that as a joke he’d “sent Mitzi a postcard saying the Gestapo was on her track”. Some joke.

After many more prejudiced remarks about “aliens” from the police and others, Mitzi bravely risks her life to help unmask the murderer, after being buttered up by Miss Marple. But even Miss M can’t resist adding a sideswipe at the poor girl: “I worked on her, my dear. She thinks far too much about herself anyway, and it will be good for her to have done something for others.” At least Julia adds: ‘She did it very well.’

At the end of the book the Little Paddocks ménage is broken up, and Mitzi gets a job in Portsmouth. The characters agree that she will dine out on her bravery and the story will improve in the telling. Mitzi’s reputation for lying and embroidering, “but she may really know something” is also a clue. Who done what and why? Read it yourselves!

More here, and links to the rest.