Death in the Stocks - Georgette Heyer

So, after finishing that book that we're going to try and forget about until the film comes out because it upset us too much, I'm now flipping back to 1935 and Georgette Heyer's Death in the Stocks.

Just survived being dropped in the bath

This particular book has always held a fascination to me. My grandad told me a story about when he was in the RAF during the war and he was stationed to watch a British plane that had crashed near him. He basically had to watch the wreckage until the authorities could come and remove the bodies, to stop, as he put it, kids climbing in the cockpit and poking the poor airmen. Now, he spent quite a few hours next to that plane and remembers very vividly that sitting, half read, on the dashboard (do planes have dashboards??) of the mangled cockpit was Death in the Stocks by Georgette Heyer. He always wondered what the book was about and what part the pilot had made it up to. A few years ago I bought him a copy but with his Parkinson's and failing eyes, I'm not sure he's ever read it, but I know he'll never forget that scene, and I'll never forget him telling me.


Georgette Heyer is perhaps best known for her Regency romance books with titles like “The Convenient Marriage” and “The Reluctant Widow” - that one has always made me laugh. Is there usually anything other than a reluctant widow?? Unless you're in Gone Girl, of course.... Ahem. But, Heyer's 12 detective novels all contain a dry wit that is perhaps lacking in the likes of Christie or Allingham. Although her plots are akin to Dame Agatha, her writing feels much more like the dry knowing work of John Dickson Carr. Whilst this could be argued to be due to a lot of her mystery works being helped along by her husband, George Rougier, he only provided plot ideas – characterisation and dialogue remained firmly in Heyer's hands.


I think I've only read two Heyer mysteries before, 'Why Shoot a Butler?' and 'A Blunt Instrument'. I fell in love with the characters of the latter, although I seem to remember both stories seemed to drag to the denouement rather than race there like a Christie novel would. I always seems to come back to Agatha Christie but, in my opinion, the only person who can write a better crime novel than her is Arthur Conan Doyle. It's hard not to compare all the other “Queens of Crime” of the early 20^th century to her.


The blurb for Death in the Stocks reads:


A moonlit night. A sleeping village. And an unaccountable murder.


An English bobby returning from the night patrol finds a corpse in evening dress locked in the stocks on the village green. He identifies the body immediately. Andrew Vereker was not a well-loved man, and narrowing down the suspects is not going to be an easy job. The Vereker family are corrupt and eccentric – and hardly cooperative.


It's another case for the resourceful Superintendent Hannasyde, who sets off on the trail of a killer so cunning that even his powers of detection are tested to their limits.



“Death in the Stocks is that rare and refreshing thing – a clever problem stated, developed and finally solved in terms of character” - The Times