Mon 14 Dec 2015
Archived Review: KATHARINE HILL – Dear Dead Mother-in-Law.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
KATHARINE HILL – Dear Dead Mother-in-Law. E. P. Dutton; hardcover; 1944. Books, Inc., hardcover reprint, 1944?
This is the first half of a two-part series on Katharine Hill’s complete works of mystery fiction. Part two, covering her second novel, Case for Equity, also involving her series character detective, Lorna Donahue, will be reported on shortly.
In Crime Fiction IV, Al Hubin provides us with no information on Katharine Hill, neither birth nor death date. She seems to have written the two books and vanished. But not quite, or at least not completely. The copyrights on both books were renewed in the early 1970s, so she was still alive then. I also have tracked down the name of a sister, and the sister’s daughter, but – all three have very common names, and the hunt has bogged down. [Bogged down totally, as a matter of fact. I have learned nothing since I first wrote this review, nor does Al Hubin shed any further light.]
Lorna Donahue is a widow who lives in Connecticut, the town of Ridgemont, to be precise. Even though fictitious as far as Connecticut is concerned, it’s obviously a wealthy sort of town in the semi-rural Wilton-Weston-Ridgefield suburban part of the state. Or at least in 1943 or so, it would have been quite rural, and with a gasoline shortage a large problem of the day, walking was a common alternative to driving.
Only gradually do we learn about Lorna’s prior life: several husbands, on the stage, the newspaper game and now the real estate business, for which she has a partner, thankfully, for it allows her both (a) to be snooping into homes while people are gone and (b) to have someone to run the business while she is busily doing the aforementioned snooping.
These last two observations are my own. Found dead at a bridge party is a recent bride’s outspoken mother, emphasis on outspoken, and it is her husband (of the recent bride) who is accused of killing his mother-in-law. And clapped immediately into jail, with no provision for bail, and so he sits, as the daughter (and his wife) moves in with Lorna.
Who of course does not believe for a moment that he did it. A much more likely is the snooty woman (my observation) whom the dead woman, not long before she died, accused of cheating at cards on the continent, in partnership with a younger man everyone assumes she was cheating on her husband with (now deceased). Or it could have a tramp. Britain never had a monopoly of tramps to be murder suspects.
Without my being able to come up with a better word, the sleuthing that is done is charming, as long as you can ignore the fact that the police department on the job is not on the job, because if they were, Lorna would have hardly a role to play. The small town atmosphere is evoked through many small details, describable only by someone who lived through that small era in time, unreproducible by someone would attempt to write a story taking place in such a setting today.
The humor is sneaky but not all subtle. From a brief passage, as Lorna takes in her new guest (Pamela, the daughter), page 39:
Later on, Lorna is trying to envision what kind of defense that Walter (the son-in-law) might be able to raise. From page 166:
You have probably decided long before now whether or not this is book you feel urged to seek out and purchase on the Internet, and I don’t blame you at all. The detective work is successful, however, no matter how improbable (and perhaps even naive) its basis in reality may be. Gritty hard-boiled fiction it’s not, but please don’t get me wrong. Following the clues and solving the mystery – that’s the edge that makes this old-fashioned suburban cozy work for me.
December 14th, 2015 at 5:32 pm
This a scarce book. There are at present two copies offered for sale on the Internet. The bargain of the two is a first edition in jacket in the $50 range; the second is the Books reprint at $100, with no mention of a jacket.
December 15th, 2015 at 3:39 pm
Rare, but not necessarily well done.
December 15th, 2015 at 7:11 pm
I wonder how great a correlation statisticians might find between the two.
Not that this was bad book, mind you. Flawed yes,but some readers might not mind them.