A model is found murdered in a private art school situated in a village near a sizeable town. Artists in Crime by Ngaio Marsh? No, a later book (1943) by Moray Dalton (real name Katherine Renoir). Some say this novel compares favourably with the work of the Crime Queens: Christie, Marsh and Sayers. Others find the ending a cop-out. The central romance is rather pallid, and disappointingly, most of the students aren't even sketched in. We concentrate on the rather ordinary Cherry, and her best friend, gossip-monger and snooper Betty: She was an ordinary-looking girl who had never had any excitement or power over anyone.
We're in the middle of World War II, investigating the murder with Dalton's series detective Inspector Hugh Collier, and there's a lot about how you get from A to B in the blackout when you are a policeman without a car – or even a torch. Characters really are two-dimensional: the ghastly Arnold might have had some redeeming features in the hands of the Queens. Descriptions of interiors form the main social comment.
Shy art teacher Mr Kent has been railroaded into sharing a house with his hard-faced sister-in-law (mother of the awful Arnold): The mantelpiece was crowded with ebony elephants and brass jugs from Benares, the the second-rate junk brought home by second-rate exiles.
The school is owned by Signor Morosini, a society portrait painter engaged to one of his subjects: The formal Italian garden and the ornate facade of Bello Sguardo looked oddly artificial under the leaden November sky, with the falsity of exhibition buildings in the unkind light of day. Collier turned up his coat collar. It was an unconscious reaction to the shivering nudity of the statues on their pedestals among the dripping laurels.
Caretakers Mr and Mrs Pearce come under suspicion: Collier had been turning over the pages of a large family Bible that lay on a red wool mat on a table in the window, with a pink and blue vase inscribed, ‘A Present from Margate”, which Pearce had won as a prize in the shooting gallery of a fun fair, and an aspidistra in a pot, wrapped up in crepe tissue paper.
Late in the story, we visit a cemetery: A brand-new white marble angel pointing heavenwards, in a neat railed-in space covered with white marble chips. The discordant effect of this monument of bad taste was slightly mitigated by a large bunch of wine-coloured button chrysanthemums laid at the foot of the pedestal.
Snobbery is sprinkled through the text. Inspector Collier muses that "cheaper cars had made it possible for the businessman to move farther out of London" and suburbanise the countryside.
One of the characters comments: “I say, you’re not a bit like a policeman.” As she would have expressed it, he looked like a gentleman.
The Inspector meets the art school's owner: He was not Collier’s idea of a gentleman, but he was prepared to make allowances for a foreigner, even if he had been naturalised and had lived many years in England.
The students lodge in the nearby village. One of the landladies "goes out to oblige”, maintaining the fiction that cleaners were not servants who worked for money.
Nobody mourns the dead model, who was once beautiful and popular but is now rather over the hill at 35, poor dear. One of the characters opines: If she chose to try she could get any man, not for keeps, of course, but long enough to ruin him.” Another adds: I gathered that [her landlady] made a distinction between the steady boyfriend and the casual pick up, the latter not being allowed. Plus she scoops up the male students and they drive off to "road houses". These were new, vulgar Tudorbethan pubs situated on arterial roads.
One reader asked, "Did anyone ever talk like that?" I wonder if this kind of thing is what she meant:
Arnold speaking: If this is A.R.P. again, the mater is sick of all this fuss and nonsense and so am I, and you can go and boil your heads. We’ve got some friends in playing bridge, and I’ve got to go back so you can cut the cackle.
ARP stands for "air raid precautions", and ARP Wardens policed the blackout. If buildings were dark at night it was harder for the Germans to spot them. "Mater" is Latin for mother. "Boil your head" and "Cut the cackle and come to the horses" are old-fashioned slang.
Betty is described: She liked to be mysterious and say ‘Ha! Ha!’ and ‘I could a tale unfold!’ and that sort of rot.
"I could a tale unfold" is from Hamlet. “How sick making” is a hangover from the 20s. "Don’t mind me” means "Don't take any notice of me". "Wigs on the green" means something like "handbags at dawn", but I'm not sure why.
"And all that" is a contemporary tic.
Morosini's fiancée's "brother came here and called him a W*p and an outsider, and made her feel that by sticking to him she was being broad-minded and intelligent and all that.
Arnold was briefly a student at the school, but the staff didn't understand him: "I suppose they wanted him to draw accurately and all that.”
Anyway, Dalton really can write.
Review of Artists in Crime here.
More golden age mysteries here, and links to the rest.
