Death In The Forest
A review of Death in the Forest by Moray Dalton – 230531
Another walk on the wild side with Moray Dalton who seems to specialise in exploring the more outlandish or just plain odd sides of human behaviour and psychology. It is unusual if not a little refreshing to pick up what is ostensibly a Golden Age murder mystery to find that it has an (un)healthy slice of lycanthropy to spice thing up. Dalton’s ninth novel in her Hugh Collier series, originally published in 1939 and now reissued as part of a batch of five by Dean Street Press, is a bold, unusual tale which ultimately, for all its ambition, does not quite come off.
There are two distinct strands to the tale, conjoined through the characters of Celia Holland and Roger Frere. Celia Holland, engaged as a governess to a family in the fictional South American republic of San Rinaldo, is caught up in a revolution just at the time that Roger Frere, a close friend from Blighty, has landed there on a cruise he has taken to recover from the tragic death of his step sister, Sybil, in a car crash in a car which he had bought her as a present. The two seek to escape but are split up, Roger helped by a local woman, Nina, whom he subsequently marries on the trip home in what quickly becomes a loveless marriage.
In England, in a village in the New Forest, Roger has inherited Frere Court where he lives with his stepmother and his step brother. It is an unhappy household, content to live off Roger’s money but brooding with resentment and thwarted ambition. Nina has not made any attempt to integrate herself into family life and seems only interested in eating more than her fair share of meat and living in the semi-dark.
Meanwhile, there are rumours of something nasty in the wood which scares the horses and dogs and is said to have led to the death from heart failure of a stranger who was cutting through the forest. It does not take much imagination on the reader’s part to work out that the identity of the stranger has a direct link to San Rinaldo and the escape from the revolutionary coup.
Celia, whose father is the local village, is back in the village on a break from her role as governess, resumes her friendship with Roger. She receives an unexpected gift of dates but is prevented from eating them by a neighbour, Major Enderby, who had been something in the Indian police, and now is seeing out a quiet retirement in the village. Enderby has the dates analysed and finds that they were coated not in sugar but in powdered glass, a South American form of murder. Using his contacts at Scotland Yard he voices his concerns at what is going on and Hugh Collier is sent down with the unenviable task of solving the intriguing mystery.
Collier, an empathetic policeman but probably not the brightest, soon finds he has another problem on his hands, the death of a maid at Frere Court from poisoning. It would be fair to say that he struggles to make sense of what is going on and, whilst he has his suspicions, he is as much a victim of Dalton’s misdirection and shoals of piranha as the reader might be. It takes a gripping denouement with a car smash to bring matters to a head.
What seems to be a story straight from the world of the supernatural turns out to be something more conventional, a tale of jealousy and revenge for previous wrongs. It is not a fair play novel by any stretch of the imagination and even the solution(s) offered leave too many loose ends hanging to be entirely satisfactory.
Nevertheless, it is a great read from an author who has too long fallen into obscurity, perhaps because she was not content to follow the conventions of the genre but saw it as a framework to bend to wherever her imagination took her. She is not content to give the reader an easy ride and demands some attention otherwise witticisms such as calling the reporter Tom Smith Crackers after the inventor of the Christmas Cracker will pass you by. Rather like a cracker the excitement of this book is more in the build up to pulling it apart than what is inside.
