MURDER MOST FESTIVE

The murder of an old friend throws a pall over the 1938 Yuletide festivities at Westbury Manor.

To celebrate the holiday, Lady Olivia Westbury has landed an especially prized guest: Anthony De Havilland, MP. Besides inviting her sons, London banker Stephen and charity worker Edward, to join her daughter, Lydia, who’s still unmarried and living on the estate she’ll never inherit, Olivia has rounded out the guest list with her oldest friend, Rosalind Ashwell, and her stuffy husband, William; Lord Westbury’s school chum David Campbell-Scott, who made a fortune from a Malayan rubber plantation; sodden jester Freddie Rampling; and Lydia’s friend Hugh Gaveston, who funds his interests in magazine collecting and taxidermy from his late parents’ estate. When the new footman finds Campbell-Scott shot to death early Christmas morning and the local constable, whose only talents are for obfuscation and malapropism, pronounces the death a suicide despite some obviously dodgy footprints in the snow around the corpse, Hugh decides to launch his own investigation. In the process, characters are not so much developed as denuded of their self-protective layers until the climactic secret is revealed. The presentation throughout is insufferably arch, as when debut novelist Moncrieff invokes a hypothetical observer: “not for our spectator the uncouth sport of loitering to steal any conversational crumbs.” Fans of the period will be left yearning for Moncrieff’s golden-age models—Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers—whose smarter plotting and dialogue come off as far more effortless.

As Lord Westbury wearily reflects: “There was really no escaping it: this Christmas was a catastrophe.” Amen.