So I sat down to read an English village mystery from the Thatcher era. I think it’s because of brain chemistry changes that occurred when I drank a lot of honeyed tea for a cold. When I was a kid in high school, I read a lot of these since my high school library had all of the Agatha Christie books and my grandmother had quite a collection of such which my mother inherited too early. But every once and again, I get the urge for one of these books, and so I pick up the occasional title.
This book is kind of a whodunit slash British police meanderal (which, at 160 pages, does not give it a lot of room to wander). Nanny Gray is a village oldster and, well, Nanny to a lot of the local families who lived in a cottage given to her by one of her titled charges shortly before he died. He also redid his will to make her the sole heiress, leaving out the remainder of his family. She’s also served the local Arab family, whose wife might have let slip her secret assignation with her husband’s cousin. And since she’s crotchety, she also might have offended the local miscreants. So when she’s found dead in the woods, it could be an accident, or it could be… MURDER!
Well, of course it’s murder. So the investigating officer Bone has to walk about and talk to the various people over large quantities of tea and scones and deal with his own problems (a damaged daughter and his own grieving for his lost wife and son, victims of a car accident). Eventually, he gets his man, sort of, and the story comes out. But at the end, one’s not sure that his efforts helped at all.
Maybe there’s a British lesson in there. Maybe this reflects Britain of the 1980s or how the British mystery authors of the 1980s wished it still were. One thing’s certain: this period has passed in British history, and the Thatcher era might as well be the Thomas Hardy era.
