Death in the Stocks

Andrew Vereker has been murdered! And his body left in the stocks on the village green! Antonia is a typical smart talking it girl who's glad to see the (stabbed) back of her interfering half-brother after a stern letter forbidding her from marrying her one true love Rudolph. Antonia's languid brother, and Vereker's probably heir, Kenneth, is ordering Champagne for everyone especially his gold digging girlfriend Violet.


It's business as usual in this Georgette Heyer mystery.


Heyer's characters are the same characters that inhabit any Golden Age novel. Her detective (Hannasyde) is cheerful and pleasant, calming the upper class suspects that the local bobbies only serve to agitate with their slow and ponderous ways. The thing that I feel separates Heyer from, say, Allingham or Marsh, is the dialogue. It's fast paced, and snarky, like reading a Katherine Hepburn film.


51 pages in, and it's impossible to give an opinion on Death in the Stocks. It reads as well as the other two Heyer novels I've read – perhaps slightly better as we have only been introduced to four (what I assume will be) main characters so far. The lack of “death at a dinner party” or “death in a stately home” means the suspects are dribbling in for us to get to know one at a time, rather than being dropped onto our lap in a big bundle to remember names and motives as we go.


Following the “least likely suspect” approach, I'll go out on a limb and say Murgatroyd (the homely live-in woman) did it.

A little look at what you may be seeing on this blog in the near future

As you may be able to see from these photos, I'm a crime fan. Not a hardboiled-rainy-night-broad-in-a-red-dress-enters-your-office-crime-fan, or a psycho-leaving-entrails-over-a-stricken-city-crime-fan, but more a something-fishy-in-a-stately-home-is-solved-without-bloodshed-crime fan. The problem being that these are the books I read the most. So, with this blog, I'm attempting to alternate. One non-genre novel, followed by one (most likely second hand penguin classic) "golden age of crime" novel. If you're fans of the queens (Christie, Sayers, Marsh, Allingham, Tey, Heyer, Mitchell etc) or the kings (Dickson Carr, Innes, Crispin, er Queen.... et al) then stay tuned.

I'll also, depending on how long I manage to keep this up for, probably avoid the non-fiction and graphic novels as that adds another three bookcases to my challenge! Who knows? Maybe by the time I've finished the fiction shelves, I'll be champing at the bit, desperate to read more and write more, and re-reads of Alan Moore may become necessary fodder.