Death and the Pleasant Voices by Mary Fitt
Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)
Mary Fitt was the pen-name of Kathleen Freeman (1897 – 1959), a British scholar. She will bring to mind another British professor – J.I.M. Stewart who wrote as Michael Innes – because, though she employs less jocosely recondite vocabulary, she expects readers to keep up with Latin tags, French idioms, and allusions from Euripides to Lewis Carroll. Like Cecil Day-Lewis, who wrote mysteries as Nicholas Blake, she was a professor of classics, so her concepts and themes are accordingly Greek: character really is destiny and fate is implacable.
In Death and the Pleasant Voices (1946), she focuses not on plot or puzzle, but, as she said in an interview, on “people, their pleasant or queer or sinister possibilities.” This is apparently the tenth book with her series hero Inspector Mallet, but he does nothing beyond questioning people in preparation for the inquest. We readers walk along with the main character Jake Seaborne as he haltingly makes his way among members of a family driven by greed and animosity. They are wrangling over the inheritance of a large country house. They are none of them admirable and deceptive as carnies that run crooked games.
Fitt sets up the characters of a pair of twins, who expected to inherit but did not; a poor relation who attended the dying days of the twins’ father ; the cranky and mean Aunt and Uncle; and finally the family doctor who has a thing for one of the twins and alcohol. The murder does not come until half-way through the book, but this balanced by the detailing for the interplay among the characters for the remainder.
Because of the focus on character instead of the puzzle and lack of detection, I can’t regard this mystery as a typical story from the golden age of mysteries. The interest lies in the surprising characters. I had to finish it to see where they ended up. In fact, the climax seemed inevitable, like a good Greek tragedy should. I’m pretty sure that I won’t rush out and read a stack of Mary Fitt’s novel right away, but surely one day I will pick another one or two.
