Murder Most Festive

July 15, 2021
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.

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August 23, 2021
In Moncrieff’s disappointing debut, a golden age closed-circle homage set in 1938, tensions are high at Westbury Manor in Sussex, where the Westbury family is hosting a Christmas gathering. The presence of Lord Westbury’s old friend David Campbell-Scott is welcomed by the nobleman, but not by his youngest child, Edward, who regards Campbell-Scott as someone who uses his power to unethically plunder resources belonging to the subjects of the British Empire. On Christmas morning, Campbell-Scott is found dead outside the manor, an apparent suicide, with only his footprints in the snow leading to the body and the gun used to inflict the fatal head wound next to it. Another guest, Hugh Gaveston, whose thorough perusal of Mystery Magazine: True Crime Sensations! has taught him “that murder investigations were excessively enjoyable larks,” puts his interest in sleuthing into action by pursuing the theory that Campbell-Scott was murdered. Labored sentences (“Like one staggering across a desert, parched and ravenous, so Hugh approached the drawing room, seeking a respite from the uncertainty that beleaguered him”) are a drawback, and the impossible crime setup isn’t resolved satisfactorily. Readers seeking a riff on traditional whodunits would be better served by Christopher Huang’s A Gentleman’s Murder.