The Chinese Shawl
A review of The Chinese Shawl by Patricia Wentworth
Never invite an amateur sleuth to stay with you. Murder seems to follow them around. If you are going to murder someone, make sure you are certain who they are. If you are going to wear a piece of someone else’s clothing, make sure that it is not distinctive. Those in a wrap are my takeaways from this, the fifth book in Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver series, originally published in 1943.
Even by the standards of the time, there is a certain cosiness and old-fashioned feel about this book, the ideal piece of comfort reading for a readership desperate to escape the rigours of warfare and the grind of daily life and rationing. Camberley’s finest, Patricia Wentworth, certainly knows how to write a story and keep her readers engaged and pulls out all the stops for her take on a country house murder. She draws her characters well, especially of Laura Fane, and it would not be a Wentworth without a little bit of love interest, Laura falling for the charms of a wounded war veteran. Apart from him, the only acknowledgement that there is a war going on is that there are a couple of evacuated families living in one of the Priory’s wings.
In truth, the story takes a while to get going, the set up complicated and requiring some careful explanation. Laura Fane was orphaned at an early age and was left The Priory, a country pile. Sadly, she did not have the funds to maintain it and so rented it to her aunt, Agnes. Now she has come of age, Laura is determined either to sell it or live in it. There is clearly a longstanding rift within the family and Laura’s relationships with her Aunt and Lucy Adams are distinctly frosty.
And then there is Agnes’ other niece, Tanis Lyle. She is a bit of a vamp, dangling men on strings, always on the look out to steal someone else’s boyfriend. With a string of jilted boyfriends, angry love rivals, and a shady maid, there are several people in the story who would jump at the chance of doing Tanis some mischief. Inevitably, Tanis is found dead, but who did it and why, and was she the intended victim? And what was the significance of a couple of threads from Laura’s missing Chinese shawl on Tanis’ hand?
As luck would have it, Miss Silver is a guest at The Priory and has been employed by Aunt Agnes to discover who has been responsible for some minor pilfering and then, when Tanis’ body is discovered, to discover who killed her. By an equally fortunate twist of fate, the police detective assigned to investigate the murder is Randall March, whose governess Miss Silver was. There is much playful dialogue between the two, an affection that you rarely see between sleuth and detective, the couple combining well to establish what has gone on. Miss Silver is content to sit innocently in the background, knitting away, plying her mind to the problem, playing on her role as a slightly eccentric house guest, while giving March some helpful steers.
There is only one murder to solve, a low body count by the genre’s standards, but the explanation of what happened is ingenious and well developed, even if the revelation of the culprit is more by way of confession than outright sleuthing.
I enjoyed what was an undemanding but entertaining read.
