The Dagwort Coombe Murder by Lynn Brock – For the 1929 Club

This book starts in sunshine, bit PG Wodehouse, bit Elizabeth von Armin. Our heroine, Sarah (aka Sally), has written a highly successful play that she herself thinks is tripe, and decides her next offering must be something meaningful. In order to concentrate she hires a tiny caravan, hitches it to her car and invites along a friend called Susan Yatt who is twice her age (I assumed as chaperone, but the friend goes back to London shortly after the murder, so presumably not) on a touring holiday.

A short while into this holiday Sally a) realises she doesn’t have a meaningful play in her and would rather have the money anyway and b) backs the caravan into a ditch. Three men, all of different classes and respectability, and seemingly at loggerheads, suspend their various arguments long enough to help her and Susan and By-by (being the name of the caravan) out again. 

It’s our first introduction to the tensions in the village where they’ll be parked up a while, and it’s not the last. 

Still the weather is beautiful, the field they’ve been allowed to park in charming, the gipsies picturesque, and the love interest turns up and is permitted to sleep in a tent and make himself suspect number two when the actual murder happens. 

So Sally decides to jolly well stay on in her caravan, and while summer turns into autumn and everyone else drifts off and drifts back (all of which is written too amusingly to actually drag but does seem to go on a long time) she ferrets. 

Apparently, as well, without causing the slightest anxiety in her friend, her young man, or herself. I mean, she's only riling up murderers and searching for evidence and even at one point surviving a car ‘accident’. Why should anyone be worried about her sleeping in a tiny caravan by herself, presumably still washing in a stream and cooking outdoors, in more or less the enemy camp? 

I'm about the age of her friend Miss Yatt and I would certainly have had Things to Say. As a modern independent 1920s woman she may well have rebuffed me, but at least I would know I had said them. 

My other complaint – and I will repeat before I do complain that this is a very amusing book and I read it in a day – is the pacing. Flurries at the beginning and end and slow and stately in the middle, and also what turned out to be possibly the stupidest plan for catching a killer I can imagine, and which involved several people - again none of whom were troubled, apparently, by the fact it was a likely way to end up with at least two more people dead. 

Signs of the times:

The biggest is surely the absolute disregard for speed limits and road safety. 

The assumption that even an independent young woman like Sally would think marriage the culmination of a woman's life, even to a man 25 years older, as has happened with her friend Pam. (Having now checked out the Wikipedia entry I suppose that could be partly down to our author being male, but I suspect it was simply a convention of the time.) 

A suggestion someone’s forehead is an indication of their temperament or not being a proper gentleman. That surely wouldn’t fly now.

In closing, thanks as always to Simon and Karen for running these clubs.