Ann Granger: Shades of Murder (2000)

Edition: Headline, 2001
Review number: 938

Many fictional detectives are at some point given a murder from the past to solve. Shades of Murder isn't like any of these; it's about how a hundred year old murder case still casts shadows into the present, bringing death once again.

Bamford, the fictional market town which is the location of Granger's Mitchell and Markby series, was also the scene of one of the notorious Victorian poisonings. William Oakley's wife seemed to have died an accidental death from fire, but her body was exhumed after a sacked servant accused him of murder. Discovery of arsenic in the body meant that he stood trial, but he was acquitted; unable to face the small town neighbours who still believed him guilty, he disappeared and no one knew what had become of him.

Moving to the present day, his last remaining descendants, two women in their eighties, are beginning to realise that they are going to have to sell the Oakley home, a Victorian Gothic house named Fourways, and move into a more practical flat that they can afford to keep up. At that moment, a young man arrives, claiming to be their cousin, descendant of a second William Oakley marriage in Poland, and demanding a share in the property. Nobody likes the way he puts pressure on the old women - but is that a motive for killing him with the now extremely unusual method of arsenical poisoning?

Because Alan Markby is already involved with the Oakleys before Jan's death, he is taken off the investigation while, to his resentful surprise, Scotland Yard are called in. In almost all police detective stories, the point of view is that of the investigator called in rather than the locals, and Granger milks her unusual device for comic as well as dramatic effect.

When I bought this novel, the lady in the bookshop - also a Granger fan - said that she had heard that this would be the last Mitchell and Markby story. I hope not - it has been a most enjoyable series of mysteries.

Ann Granger: Murder Among Us (1992)

Edition: Headline, 1992 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 901

There is more humour in Muder Among Us than in most of Granger's crime novels. The murder is committed at the opening of a country house hotel, during a demonstration by a local historical society opposed to the conversion of the old house (actually an undistinguished example of late Victorian Gothic). As Granger says, the bored TV reporter covering the opening must have thought he'd won the pools - the murder follows a streak by one of the women protesters.

There is also a subplot which is almost a parody of the sort of novel beloved of pony-mad young girls. In the restaurant grounds is a refuge for horses, donkeys and ponies, which faces closure. Markby's niece helps at the refuge, and her response to overhearing a discussion about the possibility that one of the donkeys might need to be put down if better quarters couldn't be found by the winter is to take the animal and disappear into the surrounding woods.

There is a self-aware quality about many of the Mitchell and Markby novels, and the humour is particularly strong here, making Murder Among Us one of the most entertaining novels in the series.

Ann Granger: Beneath These Stones (1999)

Edition: Headline, 1999
Review number: 838

The twelfth Mitchell and Markby mystery is one of the best in the series (though I am perhaps influenced in that opinion by not having read one for some time). In many ways it fits into the standard model of the novels in the series, with Meredith Mitchell becoming involved on the fringes of one of Alan Markby's murder cases, while both of them wonder about where their relationship is heading.

Like Morse's Oxford and Wexford's Kingsmarkham, and other settings of mystery series, Bamford is an exceptionally dangerous place to live, with a high incidence of murder and violent crime. In this case, the victim is a farmer's wife from a smallholding, found on the railway embankment by a gypsy poacher checking his snares. (Danny Smith, by the way, is a character drawn without the prejudice which usually attaches to gypsies and others with unusual lifestyles in this particular genre.)

Sonia Franklin never fit in on the farm; she had come from a yuppy background in London, and life on a working farm wasn't what she expected it to be. She didn't get on with her stepdaughter, Tammy, and she was soon bored, so that she began to have affairs to pass the time. In the end, it doesn't seem terribly surprising that she had been murdered - something common to many murder mystery victims.

The big strength of this novel lies in the characterisation of the stoical twelve year old Tammy; Granger is one of the best writers of the traditional English mystery where it comes to depicting young people. (Think of the truly cringe inspiring efforts of P.D. James and Ruth Rendell as contrast.)

Ann Granger: Call the Dead Again (1998)

Edition: Headline, 1998
Review number: 431

Another Mitchell and Markby novel; once again, the usual strengths and weaknesses of Granger's series are repeated. The unreasonable coincidence by which Meredith Mitchell becomes involved in the murder takes place once again - here, she picks up a hitch-hiker who becomes the main suspect.

The night after a strange, beautiful girl hitch-hikes to Bamford, the rich Andrew Penhallow is found murdered at his own back door. As Kate Drago's purpose in coming to the town was to visit Andrew, she is naturally suspected. When the police question her, Andrew's double life is revealed: she is his illegitimate daughter rather than the mistress that others thought her to be.

I do have an additional word of criticism. Granger uses the device of the extra thin skull, useful to crime writers because it reduces the force needed for a fatal blow and so widens the field of suspects. I'm pretty positive that there is a passage in a Dorothy Sayers novel in which this idea is dismissed as too hackneyed to use in a modern detective story (but I can't remember quite where), but here it crops up again sixty years later.

Ann Granger: Where Old Bones Lie (1993)

Edition: Headline, 1994
Review number: 381

An early Mitchell and Markby mystery, Where Old Bones Lie is set at an archaeological dig. It starts when Meredith Mitchell is rung up by an old friend. Ursula has just ended a disastrous affair with a colleague. Dan is still saying that he loves her, and now his wife has disappeared and Dan is obviously lying about her whereabouts, making Ursula worry that he has murdered her. The two of them work for a Trust which is funding a dig near Bamford, where the stories of this series are set. They hope to find the grave of an early Saxon chieftain. As the dig has recently been surrounded by an encampment of New Age travellers, the Trust wants someone to sleep on site, and Meredith volunteers to keep Ursula company in a caravan there. Then the body of Dan's wife is found on a rubbish tip near the site.

A dig is a good setting for a crime novel; they are often isolated camps on farmland, offering plenty of opportunity for tensions to rise in small groups of people. (Though it is apparently now the case that the majority of UK archaeology consists of 'rescue' digs, to discover as much about a site as possible before developers move in and destroy the evidence: hardly isolated.) The puzzle is good, the characters are good. The New Age travellers are the biggest problem. Granger tries not to stereotype them, but their very presence in the story is something of a stereotypical device, using common fears of the middle class reader - and I suspect that most crime fiction readers would consider themselves middle class - to distract them from the real solution to the crime. They include stereotypical figures, such as the upper class girl most concerned to keep her activities unknown to her family. I think we are still yet to see a sympathetic and accurate portrayal of these people in a novel.

Ann Granger: A Touch of Mortality (1996)

Edition: Headline, 1996
Review number: 137

A Touch of Mortality is another of Ann Granger's well-written Mitchell and Markby crime novels, in much the same vein as the others in the series. It's basically a case of like one, like all. By this point in the series, the relationship between the protagonists is well-established, so there is less about that here and more to establish the puzzle.

Like the others, A Touch of Mortality is a village murder, a successor to those Miss Marple mysteries which were actually set in St Mary Mead. The village setting here is not the gentry and vicars world of Agatha Christie's novels, but a nineties village with modern problems of rural poverty, overspill housing estates and resented outsiders with money.

The central characters in this novel are Sally Caswell and her husband Liam. They have moved from London into the country for peace and quiet for Liam to write a book. She works in an auction house in a local town and he is a biologist at an institute of Oxford University. Because of (now finished) experiments on animals, Liam starts receiving threatening letters from animal rights activists, but it is not until Sally opens a parcel that turns out to be a letter bomb that they involve the police in the person of Alan Markby.

Other than an over-reliance on coincidence common in crime novel series - it's incredibly dangerous to be a friend of Meredith Mitchell - there is nothing to really criticise in this well-written novel.

Ann Granger: A Word After Dying (1996)

Edition: Headline, 1996
Review number: 60

One of the Mitchell and Markby series of crime novels. In A Word After Dying, the romance between Alan Markby and Meredith Mitchell has finally reached the point where they feel comfortable going on holiday together. They go to stay in a cottage belonging to Alan's sister and her family; needless to say, they begin to get involved in the death of an old woman in the small village.

The old woman, Olivia Smeaton, seems to have died perfectly naturally from a fall, but Wynne Carter, a retired investigative reporter who lives next to the cottage, has a feeling that something was wrong. As Meredith begins to investigate and pressurise a reluctant Alan into joining in, they quickly discover that the village is not the tranquil place it appears to be. Meredith begins to investigate a local coven, and soon a murder takes place.

If you enjoy the gentle tone of this series, they are all winners; this has one of the harder puzzles to solve (I didn't work it out). The books are all fairly similar, which is a criticism of most series, particularly in the detection genre.