TEA ON SUNDAY

Cooper’s methodically plotted whodunit, her only contribution to the genre, must have already seemed retro when it was first published in 1973.

Alberta Mansbridge frequently invites guests to tea on Sunday, but this week is different: She doesn’t answer the door, leaving the elect to wait in the bitter cold outside, because she’s been strangled as she sits at her desk. Although everyone tirelessly insists that everyone else (along of course with themselves) couldn’t possibly have done such a thing, it’s clear that Alberta must have admitted her killer to her securely locked home herself. By and large, then, Chief DI Frank Corby has only eight suspects to consider, some of them obligatory. Anthony Seldon is the nephew who’s stubbornly refused to take his allotted place in the family business, and Lisa Seldon is the teenage model he married. Dr. Ewan Musgrave is Alberta’s physician, Russell Holdsworth her accountant and business manager, John Armistead the veteran managing director of Albert Mansbridge Ltd. Then there are the wild cards. Myra Heseltine had been Alberta’s best friend until they quarreled six months ago and Myra moved out of Alberta’s home (why was she invited back, and why did she accept the invitation?). Sexy industrial designer Marcello Bartolozzi, Alberta’s protégé, was about to move into the apartment Myra vacated. And Barry Slater, an ex-con Alberta had befriended while she was volunteering in prison, is a protégé of a very different stripe. Cooper (1897–1994) plants plenty of red herrings for Corby to dig into, but the rhythm of his investigation and its anticlimactic big reveal make this latter-day Golden Age puzzle read more like the world’s gentlest procedural.

A genuine curiosity that could have been published a century ago or yesterday.