Murder of a Lady: A Scottish Mystery by Anthony Wynne
In a battle between deductive reasoning and psychology, which will prevail in solving the locked room mystery? (Hint: it’s not the one you think)
A quick note: I took last week off for some family issues that popped up but I’m back on my regular Tuesday/Friday posting schedule, hopefully without any further interruptions. Thanks for your patience! Now let’s get back to it with this week’s novel, 1931’s Murder of a Lady by Anthony Wynne.
In Murder of a Lady: A Scottish Mystery, Anthony Wynne takes the relationship between amateur detective and professional investigator — the bedrock upon which so much detective fiction is built — and puts it, not so much under a microscope, but into a kaleidoscope, illuminating its various facets.
The novel begins with the death of Mary Gregor, stabbed in her locked bedroom. She is the unmarried sister of the laird of Duchlan and ruled the family home with a devotion bordering on mania. Also living in the castle are her widowed brother, Hamish, his son Eoghan, Eoghan’s wife Oonagh (the names!), their young son, and a handful of servants, including a piper doing double duty as a butler (yes, there is an on-site piper cum butler. Did I mention that I loved this book?).
Amateur detective Dr. Eustace Hailey happens to be visiting nearby but abstains from working on the case at the request of the ambitious Inspector Dundas, who cockily believes he doesn’t need help. Dundas’ introduction tells us what we need to know about him:
Inspector Robert Dundas was a young man with a shrewd expression. His manner of entering the smoking-room at Duchlan announced he came to conquer. The mixture of cordiality and aloofness in the way he greeted the old laird indicated that he proposed to allow no consideration to interfere with the discharge of his duty.
The relationship between amateur detective and professional investigator is by its nature a mutually beneficial one. It is sometimes fractious, sometimes chummy, but always there is the acknowledgement, even in the most combative relationships, that they need each other. Wynne immediately dispenses with the notion, with Dundas asserting:
Crime is your hobby; it’s my business. If you fail, nobody’s going to blame you; if I fail, somebody else will be sent the next time… If you work with me and we find our man, the credit will go to you, no matter how modest you may be. The public loves amateurs. Credit is the goodwill of my business. It’s my only possession.
And so Hailey absents himself from the case until the Inspector, tail between his legs, admits defeat and asks for help. His bullying methods have alienated him from everyone in town, with the local doctor explaining, “The man’s a fusser… Nothing must escape him. And so everything escapes him. He’s always trying to hold a bunch of sparrows in one hand while he plucks them with the other.”
Dundas agrees to let Hailey work independently, following his own lines of inquiry as it suits him. For Hailey, detection is an art as much as a science, and he prefers to follow wherever his hunches take him. And so the reader settles down to enjoy an exploration of one of the most enduring tropes of the genre: a conflict not between two men but between two ideologies, ending in grudging mutual respect.
- Major plot spoilers ahead -
And then! Just when we least expect a twist, Dundas is killed, murdered in the room Hailey has exited mere moments before. As with the first murder, there is no weapon found on the scene and no way the killer could have entered and exited the room without being seen. Another impossible crime has occurred. The murder happens so abruptly that the reader’s reaction is the same as the characters’: we are gobsmacked. Dundas, set up as an antagonist to Hailey (in method, at least) is now a victim. As he was no closer to making an arrest than when he arrived, even motive is a mystery.
Enter Inspector #2, Thompson Barley, and the third methodology. In many ways Barley, gregarious and ingratiating, is the opposite of Dundas, but only as a means to an end. He is a shrewd detective, as his cross-examination of Oonagh shows:
His dramatic instinct, on the other hand, and the thickness of his social skin, enabled him to launch his formidable questions in a way that served his purpose admirably. Either those whom he was examining became resentful or they lost their composure; he knew how to profit by both happenings.
Barley makes quick work of the residents of the castle; he is noxious but effective. He is on the verge of arresting Oonagh as an accomplice for the murder of Mary Gregor when he goes outside to wait while she says goodbye to her son in his nursery. Anyone want to guess what happens next?
Yep. Barley is murdered in the same manner as Dundas, witnessed in the dark by another officer who saw nothing but the flash of a blade before Barley fell. No knife is found at the scene and Hailey, who has been a bystander for much of the investigation, finally takes center stage just in time to wrap everything up.
He reasserts his methodology, which stands in stark contrast to Dundas and Barley. “I abandon the search for the method of these crimes,” he told his companion. “And I shall not concern myself any more with their occasions. There is left only the strictly human business of motive. After all, it takes two to make a murder.”
Dr. Hailey’s focus on the psychology of the first victim and her relationships to those in the house leads him to the truth: Christina, the governess of both Eoghan and his son, killed Mary in fear that history was repeating itself in the relationship between Eoghan and Oohagh (Mary had driven a fatal wedge between Eoghan’s parents, resulting in his mother’s suicide). It was her loyalty to the family that kept her in the house, and the same loyalty that prompted her to kill when the family was once again threatened by Mary’s machinations. Dundas and Barley were murdered because they incorrectly suspected the very people she had been trying to protect.
Christina’s method feels a little farfetched: she uses chunks from a block of ice to conk her victims on the head from a window above them (death by block of ice might happen once, but three times strains credulity — and I’m not even counting a final, accidental death that occurs at the end). However, I found the motive to be compelling and in keeping with the story as it has been presented to us. There have been clues throughout, including early on, when Hailey considers why Mary might have closed her windows on such a hot night.
Panic… consists of two separate elements, namely, an immediate fear and a remote dread. It’s not always conscience which makes cowards of us; sometimes it’s memory. Having dreaded some contingency for years, we lose our heads completely when it seems to be at hand.”
He is talking about Mary’s fear of her own murder, but the same is true for Christina’s fear of history repeating itself.
Most of the scholarship around Murder of a Lady focuses on the impossible crime (Wynne wrote several) but I found it to be one of the least compelling aspects of the novel. By killing off his two detectives before letting the amateur shine, Wynne plays a more interesting game: he makes psychology the driving force behind the resolution of the crime. The puzzle aspect never interested Hailey, and the clues, such as they were, led both Inspectors to suspect the innocent. In the battle between the professionals and the amateur, the amateur wins.
Additional thoughts: There is so much more to this novel than I could fit into the above: the creepy, well-rendered gothic setting of a remote castle in the Scottish highlands. The superstitions about the loch and the water creatures that live within it, lent credence by the fish scales found on bodies of the murder victims. The role of women, centered around the Mrs. Danvers-esque Mary Gregor, so obsessed with her family name and heritage that she destroys any perceived threat to its future, contrasted with the traditionally feminine Oonagh, willing to die to protect her husband, and finally Christina, whose own warped sense of loyalty drives her to murder.