I am a big fan of the classic detective story. When I don’t have anything else to think about, I regret that Agatha Christie only wrote 70 mysteries or so, that Josephine Tey died after six novels, that Dorothy Sayers turned her attention to translation work. While other women turn to comfort foods during pregnancy, I turned to the comfort literature of the mystery. I spent my pregnancies reading everything by Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh that I could get my hands on. God bless the public library.
I am always a little sad that the mystery’s Golden Age is past. While some mysteries today are excellent (PD James springs to mind), the concisely written, spare descriptions of the whodunit of the 30s and 40s is a neglected art form. Mysteries today tend to be driven either by a new arena of specialized knowledge (”set in the heart of Samurai Japan” “fourteen new quilt patterns included” “) or exist as a way to provide a plot for characters the author doesn’t know what to do with otherwise. The use of a mystery as a mystery - a conundrum to be solved by the reader using the clues provided - seems rare, at least to a casual reader like me. So I was delighted when I discovered Patricia Moyes.
Moyes died in 2000, but she left behind nineteen novels, published between 1959 and 1993, that test the mettle of any armchair detective. Like Christie and Marsh her characters are revealed more through dialogue than description. Concision is a skill, and Moyes has it. Her books are roughly the length of Christie’s novels, and must be read as closely. The clues are provided, and the series detective, Henry Tibbet, mentions his suspicions in asides not given to the reader. “Tibbet explained,” Moyes writes, but the words of the explanation are not given to the reader. Until the very end, you must use your wits and figure things out for yourself, much like reading Miss Marple.
Angel Death, published in 1980, is Moyes’s fifteenth novel. It and it’s predecessor, Who Is Simon Warwick? rely too heavily on ideas trendy for their day, trends that are now a couple decades old. The modern reader spots the plot point too quickly for the purposes of the mystery. This ruins Who Is Simon Warwick?, but Angel Death is good enough to overcome the problem. Henry Tibbet and his wife Emmy visit fictional British possessions in the Caribbean and stay at an inn managed by friends. While there, they meet an old lady named Betsy Sprague, who disappears after leaving a message for Henry. The search ensues, drawing the Tibbets deeper and deeper into the hidden dangers of the islands.
One of the reasons I love the classic mysteries is that they tend to recognize the same moral universe I do. Good and evil still exist. Truth is still a governing principle for those who follow the good. Moyes’s novels do not always fill my hunger in this regard. Tibbet, though he fiercely and unstoppably seeks to uncover the truth, frequently decides that justice would be better served if he presented to his superiors a story more plausible than the truth. I find this personally dissatisfying, but the pleasure of reading a skillfully written whodunit outweighs my dissatisfaction.
