Who Killed Dick Whittingtonby E. & M.A. Radford
Rating: ★★★½
Series: Doctor Manson #6
Publication Date: January 1, 1947
Genre: mystery: golden age (1920-1949)
Pages: 226
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of crime, dean street december
“I think you had better telephone for the police,” he said. “This woman has been poisoned.”
Norma de Grey, the Principal in the Christmas pantomime Dick Whittington, was not popular with the rest of the Pavilion Theatre company. But was she hated enough to be killed by prussic acid, during the performance itself?
Suspicion immediately falls on the Cat, her fellow actor in the fatal scene. Until it transpires that the Cat too has been poisoned – and his understudy has a solid alibi. But someone must have donned the disguise and appeared on stage incognito. Detective-Inspector Harry Manson, analytical detective par excellence, is on the case.
I had been planning on alternating a Golden Age mystery with a Furrowed Middlebrow title, but when I saw the plot summary for this one, I had to go with it as my second DSP book of the month. This was my first by M.A. & E. Radford, and I was fairly impressed.
Technically, this is a Christmas mystery, although it is pretty sparse on the Christmas details & even sparser on Christmas cheer. It’s set in a third-rate theater company that is performing Who Killed Dick Whittington as a Christmas pantomime. I’m a U.S. reader, so the British tradition of “panto” was pretty much its own mystery for me. I had to go down a few internet rabbit trails to find out more about it, as well as about the pantomime itself. I was deeply confused when the “principal boy” was a girl.
Pretty clear that Christmas panto is not going to be allowed in Tennessee, where they have outlawed performances where individuals pretend to be other than their birth gender. Isn’t reactionary America just terrific? (No. The answer to this rhetorical question is no, it is not).
I thought that the writing in this one was quite good. One of the characteristics of the golden age mystery can be writing that is a bit turgid – this is one of the things that (in my mind at least) separates Agatha Christie from the pack. Her books are so readable. There are three interludes where the authors broke the fourth wall to address the reader directly, encouraging the reader to follow the clues. I generally don’t try to figure out whodunnit, but I if someone is looking for a fair play mystery, this one would qualify.
I also loved the fact that the sleuth, Dr. Mason is essentially forensic scientist working within a rudimentary crime lab. I had no idea that the technology for a mass spectrometer went all the way back to the 1940’s, when this was written. Science is heavily used in the solution for this mystery.
I think I may have one more Dr. Mason mystery on my kindle (Murder Jigsaw – the one with the fish). Not sure when I will get to it, but I will definitely get to it.
Next up is definitely something from the Furrowed Middlebrow imprint – Babbacombe’s by Susan Scarlett.