Scared to Death

by Anne Morice

  Anne Morice

  Scared to Death

  I had detected no sound or movement, but her eyes were open and, as I approached, she fixed them on me with an agonised stare.

  Tessa Crichton, actress wife of Scotland Yard Inspector Robin Price, comes to Storhampton to star in the local drama festival . . . and finds her most challenging role in a masquerade ending in murder. It begins when the insufferable Edna Mortimer sees her exact double at the races—and is literally scared stiff.

  Somebody has played a nasty practical joke on the wealthy dowager. But one look at Mrs. Mortimer’s terrified eyes and some indecipherable pencil squiggles tell Tessa this is no laughing matter. Could the grim prankster be one of Edna’s greedy heirs? When the will is finally read, it only raises more questions. Someone is not getting their just deserts. But can Tessa find out who before the deadly double strikes again?

  Scared to Death was originally published in 1977. This new edition features an introduction and afterword by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  ‘Anne Morice has a gift for creating intelligent, affection-generating characters, set in light and entertaining atmospheres.’ Spectator

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Contents

  Introduction by Curtis Evans

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Titles by Anne Morice

  Copyright

  Introduction

  By 1970 the Golden Age of detective fiction, which had dawned in splendor a half-century earlier in 1920, seemingly had sunk into shadow like the sun at eventide. There were still a few old bodies from those early, glittering days who practiced the fine art of finely clued murder, to be sure, but in most cases the hands of those murderously talented individuals were growing increasingly infirm. Queen of Crime Agatha Christie, now eighty years old, retained her bestselling status around the world, but surely no one could have deluded herself into thinking that the novel Passenger to Frankfurt, the author’s 1970 “Christie for Christmas” (which publishers for want of a better word dubbed “an Extravaganza”) was prime Christie—or, indeed, anything remotely close to it. Similarly, two other old crime masters, Americans John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen (comparative striplings in their sixties), both published detective novels that year, but both books were notably weak efforts on their parts. Agatha Christie’s American counterpart in terms of work productivity and worldwide sales, Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, published nothing at all that year, having passed away in March at the age of eighty. Admittedly such old-timers as Rex Stout, Ngaio Marsh, Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell were still playing the game with some of their old élan, but in truth their glory days had fallen behind them as well. Others, like Margery Allingham and John Street, had died within the last few years or, like Anthony Gilbert, Nicholas Blake, Leo Bruce and Christopher Bush, soon would expire or become debilitated. Decidedly in 1970—a year which saw the trials of the Manson family and the Chicago Seven, assorted bombings, kidnappings and plane hijackings by such terroristic entities as the Weathermen, the Red Army, the PLO and the FLQ, the American invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State shootings and the drug overdose deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin—leisure readers now more than ever stood in need of the intelligent escapism which classic crime fiction provided. Yet the old order in crime fiction, like that in world politics and society, seemed irrevocably to be washing away in a bloody tide of violent anarchy and all round uncouthness.

  Or was it? Old values have a way of persisting. Even as the generation which produced the glorious detective fiction of the Golden Age finally began exiting the crime scene, a new generation of younger puzzle adepts had arisen, not to take the esteemed places of their elders, but to contribute their own worthy efforts to the rarefied field of fair play murder. Among these writers were P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Emma Lathen, Patricia Moyes, H.R.F. Keating, Catherine Aird, Joyce Porter, Margaret Yorke, Elizabeth Lemarchand, Reginald Hill, Peter Lovesey and the author whom you are perusing now, Anne Morice (1916-1989). Morice, who like Yorke, Lovesey and Hill debuted as a mystery writer in 1970, was lavishly welcomed by critics in the United Kingdom (she was not published in the United States until 1974) upon the publication of her first mystery, Death in the Grand Manor, which suggestively and anachronistically was subtitled not an “extravaganza,” but a novel of detection. Fittingly the book was lauded by no less than seemingly permanently retired Golden Age stalwarts Edmund Crispin and Francis Iles (aka Anthony Berkeley Cox). Crispin deemed Morice’s debut puzzler “a charming whodunit . . . full of unforced buoyance” and prescribed it as a “remedy for existentialist gloom,” while Iles, who would pass away at the age of seventy-seven less than six months after penning his review, found the novel a “most attractive lightweight,” adding enthusiastically: “[E]ntertainingly written, it provides a modern version of the classical type of detective story. I was much taken with the cheerful young narrator . . . and I think most readers will feel the same way. Warmly recommended.” Similarly, Maurice Richardson, who, although not a crime writer, had reviewed crime fiction for decades at the London Observer, lavished praise upon Morice’s maiden mystery: “Entrancingly fresh and lively whodunit. . . . Excellent dialogue. . . . Much superior to the average effort to lighten the detective story.”

  With such a critical sendoff, it is no surprise that Anne Morice’s crime fiction took flight on the wings of its bracing mirth. Over the next two decades twenty-five Anne Morice mysteries were published (the last of them posthumously), at the rate of one or two year. Twenty-three of these concerned the investigations of Tessa Crichton, a charming young actress who always manages to cross paths with murder, while two, written at the end of her career, detail cases of Detective Superintendent “Tubby” Wiseman. In 1976 Morice along with Margaret Yorke was chosen to become a member of Britain’s prestigious Detection Club, preceding Ruth Rendell by a year, while in the 1980s her books were included in Bantam’s superlative paperback “Murder Most British” series, which included luminaries from both present and past like Rendell, Yorke, Margery Allingham, Patricia Wentworth, Christianna Brand, Elizabeth Ferrars, Catherine Aird, Margaret Erskine, Marian Babson, Dorothy Simpson, June Thomson and last, but most certainly not least, the Queen of Crime herself, Agatha Christie. In 1974, when Morice’s fifth Tessa Crichton detective novel, Death of a Dutiful Daughter, was picked up in the United States, the author’s work again was received with acclaim, with reviewers emphasizing the author’s cozy traditionalism (though the term “cozy” had not then come into common use in reference to traditional English and American mysteries). In his notice of Morice’s Death of a Wedding Guest (1976), “Newgate Callendar” (aka classical music critic Harold C. Schoenberg), Seventies crime fiction reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, observed that “Morice is a traditionalist, and she has no surprises [in terms
of subject matter] in her latest book. What she does have, as always, is a bright and amusing style . . . [and] a general air of sophisticated writing.” Perhaps a couple of reviews from Middle America—where intense Anglophilia, the dogmatic pronouncements of Raymond Chandler and Edmund Wilson notwithstanding, still ran rampant among mystery readers—best indicate the cozy criminal appeal of Anne Morice:

  Anne Morice . . . acquired me as a fan when I read her “Death and the Dutiful Daughter.” In this new novel, she did not disappoint me. The same appealing female detective, Tessa Crichton, solves the mysteries on her own, which is surprising in view of the fact that Tessa is actually not a detective, but a film actress. Tessa just seems to be at places where a murder occurs, and at the most unlikely places at that . . . this time at a garden fete on the estate of a millionaire tycoon. . . . The plot is well constructed; I must confess that I, like the police, had my suspect all picked out too. I was “dead” wrong (if you will excuse the expression) because my suspect was also murdered before not too many pages turned. . . . This is not a blood-curdling, chilling mystery; it is amusing and light, but Miss Morice writes in a polished and intelligent manner, providing pleasure and entertainment. (Rose Levine Isaacson, review of Death of a Heavenly Twin, Jackson Mississippi Clarion-Ledger, 18 August 1974)

  I like English mysteries because the victims are always rotten people who deserve to die. Anne Morice, like Ngaio Marsh et al., writes tongue in cheek but with great care. It is always a joy to read English at its glorious best. (Sally Edwards, “Ever-So British, This Tale,” review of Killing with Kindness, Charlotte North Carolina Observer, 10 April 1975)

  While it is true that Anne Morice’s mysteries most frequently take place at country villages and estates, surely the quintessence of modern cozy mystery settings, there is a pleasing tartness to Tessa’s narration and the brittle, epigrammatic dialogue which reminds me of the Golden Age Crime Queens (particularly Ngaio Marsh) and, to part from mystery for a moment, English playwright Noel Coward. Morice’s books may be cozy but they most certainly are not cloying, nor are the sentiments which the characters express invariably “traditional.” The author avoids any traces of soppiness or sentimentality and has a knack for clever turns of phrase which is characteristic of the bright young things of the Twenties and Thirties, the decades of her own youth. “Sackcloth and ashes would have been overdressing for the mood I had sunk into by then,” Tessa reflects at one point in the novel Death in the Grand Manor. Never fear, however: nothing, not even the odd murder or two, keeps Tessa down in the dumps for long; and invariably she finds herself back on the trail of murder most foul, to the consternation of her handsome, debonair husband, Inspector Robin Price of Scotland Yard (whom she meets in the first novel in the series and has married by the second), and the exasperation of her amusingly eccentric and indolent playwright cousin, Toby Crichton, both of whom feature in almost all of the Tessa Crichton novels. Murder may not lastingly mar Tessa’s equanimity, but she certainly takes her detection seriously.

  Three decades now having passed since Anne Morice’s crime novels were in print, fans of British mystery in both its classic and cozy forms should derive much pleasure in discovering (or rediscovering) her work in these new Dean Street Press editions and thereby passing time once again in that pleasant fictional English world where death affords us not emotional disturbance and distress but enjoyable and intelligent diversion.

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER ONE

  “You sit in front with me, Tessa,” Vi said in her masterful way, having announced her arrival at my cousin Toby’s house with a fanfare of blasts on the horn. “Marge needs the whole of the back seat to spread out her racing pages and The Sporting Life,” she explained, although I was aware, having accompanied them to race meetings in the past that the back seat also provided a distinctly more advantageous position when the picnic basket came out.

  Vi and Marge were sisters, both now middle-aged, but handsome, tall and vigorous, one of whom had been married and the other not and Vi, the unmarried one, was conspicuously more masterful than Marge. Two recent deaths, that of their mother and Marge’s husband, had released them from separate lives of tyranny and they now lived together in opulent and merry style in a pretty house about two miles from the riverside town of Storhampton, and indulged their masterful natures and capacity for enjoyment to the full by organising jumble sales, coffee mornings and wine and cheese parties galore. Apart from this and the keen interest they took in all their neighbours’ affairs, their principal passions in life centred on racing and the theatre.

  “And if anyone asks you,” Vi continued, “remember to say that Toby had intended to come with us, but changed his mind at the last minute.”

  “If anyone asks me what?” I enquired, thinking that this unknown questioner would need to have dropped in from another planet that very morning if he could seriously believe that my cousin Toby would have contemplated accompanying us on such a jaunt for a single moment. Race meetings are notorious for so many of the features of life which he is most keen to avoid, including cruel exposure to the elements, a great deal of walking about, a terrible crush of people, some of them shouting and, above all, horses.

  “If anyone asks where he is,” Vi explained with studied patience, “tiresome old Edna Mortimer was trying to scrounge a lift and I had to choke her off somehow. Apart from being such a bore, it was only a ruse to save her own petrol. I didn’t exactly lie about it, but I let it be understood that Toby was coming with us and there wouldn’t be room for her.”

  Passing over the fact that it must have required some ingenuity to let such a thing as that be understood without exactly lying about it, I promised not to forget.

  “There really isn’t room for her, even without Toby,” Marge explained, which a glance at the back seat confirmed. “Not even for her fur coat, without her inside it.”

  “You had better say he wasn’t feeling well,” Vi advised, spelling it out for me, as she was so apt to do. “That would be quite in character for Toby.”

  “Might it not sound even better,” I suggested, “to say that he’s had to go to Storhampton to help with organising the Festival?”

  “My dear child, we all know that Edna is stupid, ignorant and self-centred, but even she would be aware that the Festival has been cancelled.”

  These masterful ladies sometimes positively ask for a squashing and I could not resist it.

  “Stupid, ignorant and out of date too. The Festival is on again.”

  Her grip on the wheel did not falter, but I could tell that I had pierced her defences and Marge was so far diverted from her study of the racing pages as to let out a high scream of excitement:

  “On again? Since when, Tessa?”

  “Last night. Underground negotiations have been going on for several days, but last night clinched it. Our angel fairy godfather has stepped into the breach in the nick of time.”

  “And put up some money?”

  “Good as. Not actual cash, but a guarantee against losses of up to five thousand. Since he’ll inevitably be required to stump up every penny, it amounts to the same thing.”

  “What’s the name of this madman?” Vi demanded.

  “David Winter, which is probably one you’ve come across in a long life of theatre going. And he’s no madman. One condition of this guarantee is an option on each of the plays. Since there are three of them, all getting their first airing and all by fairly successful authors, it would be funny if there wasn’t at least one winner in the bunch. Five thousand isn’t an awful lot to pay for the rights, quite apart from all the wonderful publicity he’ll get as our Saviour of the Arts.”

  “And Toby was the one to bring off this coup?”

  “He had a hand in it. Having flogged himself into a jelly to turn out a play specially for the occasion, he was understandably reluctant to see it buried and forgotten. I have to confess that his interest in the Festival in general doesn’t go very deep.”

 
“But, presumably, if his play is any good, this David Winter would have put it on anyway?”

  “Oh, very likely, but you know how they always grab at the chance to try things out on audiences in a modest way before taking the big plunge? By the time this one gets to London, if it does, it will probably have been completely re-written, according to where the Storhampton laughs came. By the way, what makes you think Mrs. Mortimer would be wearing a fur coat on this mild May morning?”

  “She always goes racing in mink,” Vi replied. “It has nothing to do with the seasons. She’s like Toby and his play; she enjoys parading her possessions in front of an audience.”

  “There’s a horse called Festive Lad in the two o’clock,” Marge informed us. “It’s got no form, but perhaps we should put something on?”

  The curious thing about Marge’s betting system was that despite her keen and well informed study of the subject, which embraced such esoteric points as the antecedents and past performance of every horse in the race, whether it preferred soft going to hard, five furlongs to a mile and how favourable or otherwise the draw, yet when it came to slapping down her money she invariably backed the runner whose name provided some such loose connection as this. Weirder still was the fact that it invariably paid off. I suggested that if it did so this time she should put her winnings into the fund for the Storhampton Music and Drama Festival.

  “Oh, we’ve already done our bit there,” she assured me. “In fact, Vi and I raised over fifty pounds at a Cheese and Wine. Edna’s the one you ought to be after for a contribution. And I wish you luck!”

  “Oh, I know, she’s a hopeless case. Helena Plowman, who’s the Treasurer, is simply furious with her. She sent out an appeal to all the prominent citizens and Edna was the only one who didn’t stump up a cent. The most sickening thing of all was that she made poor old Tilly write back a very sanctimonious letter saying that, with so much distress and poverty in the world, she preferred to send whatever she could afford to more deserving charities.”