Fri 30 Jul 2021
An Archived Mystery Review by Maryell Cleary: NANCY SPAIN – Cinderella Goes to the Morgue.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[8] Comments
NANCY SPAIN – Cinderella Goes to the Morgue. Miriam Birdseye #3. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, 1950. Virago Modern Classics, paperback, forthcoming: February 2022.
Nancy Spain has taken murder in the theater, à la Ngaio Marsh, and has worked it out as farce. It is the Theatre Royal, in Atkins Street, Newchester, where the annual Christmas pantomime is being produced. This year it’s Cinderella.
Natasha DuVivien, former ballerina, and her great friend, Miriam Birdseye, genius, are in Newchester for no good reason. Natasha fills in as “The Fairy of the Powder Puff,” when the dancer is fired for inebriation. So the two friends are immersed in the affairs of the cast, including the comedian Hampton Court, and Newchester’s mayor, Thomas Atkins, his wife and extended family.
When the “Prince Charming,” Vivienne Gresham, falls through an open trapdoor on stage and is killed, it is clear to Miriam and Natasha that murder has been done. Vivienne’s son, and her two ex-husbands, all having to do with the pantomime, are natural suspects. When clothing coupons by the thousands are found sewn into Vivienne’s costumes, suspicion goes beyond them.
Then there is another murder, complications pile up, and the book races to a wild conclusion. Along the way Natasha falls in love again, as usual in Spain’s books. Miriam seems to be just along for the ride, for Natasha does all the detecting.
Read as counterpoint to the many excellent theater mysteries, this is good fun.
July 30th, 2021 at 7:39 pm
My exposure to Nancy Spain was with one book, in all likelihood not this one, and my dumbfounded reaction was “what the heck is going on?”
I was very young at the time.
Coming up soon, Maryell Cleary’s review of a second book by Nancy Spain. Be on the lookout for it.
July 30th, 2021 at 10:01 pm
Sounds a bit like cozy meets screwball.
July 30th, 2021 at 10:20 pm
It’s been too long for me to say for sure, but I think you’ve nailed it.
July 31st, 2021 at 8:41 am
Nancy Spain was an outrageous character herself, who would have fit in perfectly in our age. When she died (she was killed in a plane crash at 46), her good friend Noel Coward said (in his diary), “It is cruel that all that gaiety, intelligence and vitality should be snuffed out when so many boors and horrors are left living.”
July 31st, 2021 at 8:52 am
Nancy Spain has her own page on Wikipedia, but if she had an eccentric life, the entry only hints at it. There aren’t a lot of details:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Spain
July 31st, 2021 at 9:03 am
Enough to make her oddity by 1950s standards apparent, Steve:
“Often in the news and tempted to marry to seem respectable – Spain’s name was linked with that of Gilbert Harding – she lived openly with the editor of She, Joan Werner Laurie (Jonny),[3] and was a friend of the famous, including Noël Coward and Marlene Dietrich.[3] She and Laurie were regulars at the Gateways club in Chelsea, London, and were widely known to be lesbians.[6] Spain and Laurie lived in an extended household with the rally driver Sheila van Damm, and their sons Nicholas (born 1946) and Thomas (born in 1952). Nicholas was Laurie’s son; Thomas was also described as Laurie’s youngest son, but may have been Spain’s son[3] after an affair with Philip Youngman Carter, husband of Margery Allingham.”
July 31st, 2021 at 4:11 pm
Thanks, Roger. To tell you the truth, though, after thinking about it a while, this may really be all I need to know. Anything more could easily fall into the category of Too Much Information!
August 1st, 2021 at 8:13 am
I can vaguely remember her as a TV personality and wit when I was a child in the early 1960s and admiring her and Gilbert Harding when I didn’t know what “lesbian” or “homosexual” meant.
Is one reason for the comparatively rapid acceptance of homosexuals and homosexuality the effect of unacknowledged but obvious gay people on TV and radio then and later (in the UK at least) – were people “conditioned” into toleration by their earlier approval of entertaining eccentricity, perhaps?
“Nancy Spain” is also the title of a love song by Christy Moore – no relation, I presume!