CURSE OF THE SAVOY

Things are stompin’ at the Savoy when a mythical curse rears its deadly head at the legendary London hotel in Base and Emery’s mystery novel.

London in the 1960s is swinging, and Priscilla Tempest, head of the Savoy’s press office, is keeping stellar company. She’s been invited to a soon-to-be-notorious dinner in the hotel’s swank Pinafore Room, hosted by none other than legendary director Orson Welles. The guest list includes Noël Coward, Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant (who takes a bit of a shine to Priscilla), Lord Mountbatten, the scandalous Christine Keeler, Fleet Street maven Jack Cogan—aka “the Jackal”—and Lady Anne Harley, a valued Savoy regular whose son is a distinguished diplomat. (The diners are “impressive for their various levels of celebrity even within the hard-to-impress confines of the Savoy.”) Much to Welles’ displeasure, his showmanship is upstaged when Coward regales the table with a tale of a supposed Savoy curse: If a dinner party has 13 guests, the first to leave will suffer an untimely end. “Poppycock,” declares Lady Anne, who is the first to leave. The next morning, she’s found dead of a sudden heart attack, and her son, who is something of a bounder, is nowhere to be found. Adding to the cursedness is the non-fatal stabbing of Cogan in his hotel room. News of the curse could be damaging to the hotel’s peerless reputation, so Priscilla is directed by the Savoy’s general manager in no uncertain terms to nip this hex business in the bud. This fourth installment in the Priscilla Tempest Mystery series by Base and Emery (who is the real-life inspiration for Priscilla) is a breezy read with a glamorous cast of iconic characters that expands to include Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, a jazz club owner, an American blackmailer, and the Queen herself. The dialogue doesn’t quite capture, say, Coward’s legendarily biting wit or Welles’ imperiousness, but Priscilla is an entertainingly plucky and resourceful heroine.

Followers of Priscilla thus far will find this star-studded ’60s era mystery groovy.