Thu 17 Dec 2020
ANNE MORICE – Scared to Death. Tessa Chrichton #11. Macmillan, UK, hardcover, 1977. St. Martin’s, US, 1978. Detective Book Club 3-in-1 edition, hardcover. Bantam, US, paperback, 1986.
All but two of Anne Morice’s 25 mystery novels featured actress-amateur sleuth Tessa Chrichton and were strictly in the Golden Age of Detection traditions, albeit in solid contemporary (1970s-80s) surroundings. (You can find out a lot more about her on Curtis Evans’ blog here. He has been writing about her quite extensively lately.)
Spurred by his reviews of her books, Scared to Death was the easiest for me to find. It was one of the three books in the Detective Book Club edition on the top of the bookshelf next to me as I type this. (You cannot make up coincidences such as this.) Unfortunately, let me put it this way, maybe I should have started with another one.
This one begins as a elderly, eccentric, rich and quite controlling acquaintance of Tessa becomes strangely haunted by a doppelgänger of herself wherever she goes, and each time she sees her, her health takes another turn for the worst. No one else manages to see this double, so it is passed off as a curious fantasy on her part. Until, that is, she is completely bedridden and dies.
No one thinks more of it but Tessa, whose inquisitive nature wants to know more. The police do not take part in any of her secret undercover investigation, which involves a boatload of relatives and close friends, a will that there may or may be the current one, and a fictionalized diary the dead woman was in the process of writing.
There are a number of witty lines in the telling, but there aren’t enough of them to make up for the fact that the tale just isn’t all that interesting, nor are any of the possible suspects. The story goes from slow to slower and then even slower.
Morice’s way of hiding clues is to hide them in a disorienting mix of clouds and confusion, which is not Agatha Christie’s usual method of operation: which is to leave right out in the open and dare you to spot them, which I almost never have. Even a table that matched up names in the diary with their real-life counterparts did nothing to brighten up Tessa’s explanation of how she solved the case.
The end may prove worthy of the journey, but overall quite the disappointment, then. Your opinion may vary.
December 17th, 2020 at 4:16 pm
Our British friends (Bob & Sue Adey) introduced Jackie to the books of Anne Morice (pronounced Morris, as in Maurice Gibb) ca. 1980. She managed to get hold of all of them (the first four were not published in the U.S.) and read them all.
December 17th, 2020 at 4:41 pm
I believe Curtis Evans said on his blog that Dean Street Press will be reprinting all of them, but don’t quote me on that, since I couldn’t find the reference again.
December 17th, 2020 at 5:30 pm
Ah yes, I was right. Here’s the link. Read all the way to the end:
http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-game-goes-on-death-in-grand-manor.html
December 17th, 2020 at 9:23 pm
Fair play more by obfuscation than cleverness, which for me is a far lesser way of doing it. These aren’t cozies, and the mystery is good enough, but Tessa’s methods and those of Morice aren’t quite classical detection in the Christie mode.
I didn’t read enough in the day to form an informed opinion about Morice overall, but I did find Tessa less inspiring than tiresome.
December 17th, 2020 at 9:39 pm
“Obfuscation” is a very very good word. I wish I’d thought of using it.
December 17th, 2020 at 9:43 pm
Whenever I find myself more negative than positive about a book in one of these posts, I always ask myself afterward how bad was it really? In this case, there really was a lot to enjoy. The pieces were there, including both the plot itself and many of the characters. The way it was told just didn’t come together for me.
Would I read another? Probably not, but that’s an answer due more to how many books are already in the queue (thousands, actually) than any other reason.