MURDER'S A SWINE

Nestled beneath the playful title and byline, a pseudonym for then-married Gordon Neil Stewart and Pamela Hansford Johnson, is an equally madcap case of murder during the London “sitzkrieg” originally published in 1943.

Featherstone Mews air warden Clem Poplett and Stewarts Court resident Agnes Clunkershill Kinghof, nee Sidebotham, find the first victim buried among the sandbags inside the No. 2 shelter for Stewarts Court. Agnes’ neighbor Adelaide Foster Sibley, who’s already been properly spooked by the vision of a blue pig’s head outside her window, tearfully identifies the dead man as Reginald Coppenstall, the brother she hasn’t seen in nearly 30 years, and the most likely killer as Reg’s son, actor Maclagan Steer, who’s the heir of her significant family estate. The only problem is that the other neighbors who had access to the shelter—deaf, retired French cafe owner Jeanne-Louise Charnet, government bureaucrat George Warrender, medical student Felix Lang, Mrs. Sibley’s flatmate Phyllada Rowse, aka Phyllada Rounders, the creator of deathless young fictional heroine Fernia Prideaux, and Agnes’ husband, Capt. Andrew Kinghof—don’t include Steer. The campaign of improbable terror launched by someone calling himself “THE PIG-STICKER” continues until Mrs. Sibley is dead and her will reveals that she hasn’t left a penny to Steer after all. The bigwig Scotland Yard sends to investigate turns out to be Agnes’ cousin Lord Herbert Whitestone, better known as Pig, and it’s no surprise when Agnes and Andrew run sleuthing rings around him, though their detection is upstaged by several broadly comic set pieces: a Punch and Judy show, a production by the Milmanscroft Guides, and a meeting of the Free British Mussolites.

Zany period antics for those who’ve had enough of the present day.