Poison In The Pen
A review of Poison in the Pen by Patricia Wentworth – 250308
Did Patricia Wentworth, Camberley’s finest, miss a trick by not calling the twenty-ninth novel in her Miss Silver series, originally published in 1955, The Cat That Growled? It is the antithesis of Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of Silver Blaze (1892), the culprit’s identity being confirmed by the reaction of an animal.
The sending of poison letters is ideally suited to a cosy mystery set in a rural community and there are marked similarities to Agatha Christie’s earlier The Moving Finger (1942), although Miss Silver takes a more central role than did Jane Marple in Christie’s take. It is also a rather egalitarian crime, rather like poisoning, one that is as equally suited to being committed by a woman, perhaps more so, as a man and is one that eliminates the need to get one’s hands dirty in the mechanics of death. Poison letters are a form of revenge best served cold, their contents imbuing a sense of dread, shame, and guilt in their recipients, sometimes leading to their public shaming and occasionally to their deaths.
There has been an outbreak of poison letters in Tilling Green, rather similar to the one five years earlier in nearby Little Poynton. One of the recipients, Doris Pell, is found dead in the river, and another, Connie Brooke, found dead after taking some sleeping tablets. Both are assumed to have been cases of suicide prompted by the shame of the disclosures in the letters. Brooke’s death piques the suspicions of Frank Abbot, who suggests that Miss Silver ensconces herself in the village and use her remarkable powers of observation and her acute hearing to see what she can find. Her choice of accommodation is very pertinent.
It is only when there is a third death, that of Colonel Repton, who had discovered that his unsuitable wife, Scilla, was cheating on him and had imprudently announced that he was changing his will, found slumped in his study with the unmistakable whiff of almonds emanating from his whisky glass, that the suspicion of there being a murderer on the loose dawns on the villagers. Scilla is an obvious suspect, but Miss Silver believes that, aside from the poison letters, there is another connection between the three deaths and that they had all been murdered by the same hand.
Despite the shoal of red herrings, there are really only four viable suspects, a conclusion that Miss Silver comes to because they are the four houses that Doris visited on the afternoon of her death and where she could have found the torn corner of the letter she had received showing up against the pattern of the carpet. Two of the suspects are quickly eliminated because of the shades of their carpets, leaving two others, one rather close to home.
A rather rapid mental implosion and a confession rather makes Miss Silver’s task easier, although she does run some physical risk, being trapped in a cottage rapidly filling up with gas with what is feared to have been a young child but turns out to be a cat using up several of its nine lives. She is rescued by Jason Leigh who not only is the hero of the hour but has the good fortune to win a bride, wrestling her away from a potential unsuitable match with Scilla’s bit on the side.
Miss Silver is her usual mix of seemingly innocent naivety and razor-sharp observational qualities, coughing and knitting away with the happy knack of asking the right question at the right time and creating an atmosphere in which her fellow conversationalist is very much at ease, a style that produces more results than a confrontational manner.
For my taste the book is padded with too many descriptions of clothing and furnishings and the contents of conversations previously recorded and repeated almost verbatim, but Wentworth redeems herself with a clever twist on the trope of the poison letter. It is not the contents of the letters themselves that cause the deaths but the knowledge of who wrote them. And, of course, there is the cat who growled, Abimelech.
