Miss Silver Mysteries or Elaine Strikes Again

The order from Alibris which brought "Andrew Jackson and the Bank War," also included three books by authorsall of which were once again suggested by Elaine at Random Jottings. I started out with "The Clock Strikes Twelve" by Patricia Wentworth, a Miss
Silver mystery. Thinking about realistically I shouldn't be surprised about the number of authors that I am hearing about for the first time.

However, I think the realm of the mystery story is to some extent an exception. As I noted in some of my first posts on this blog, I have read pretty widely in the mystery field - especially British mysteries and especially those that are published in a series. Yet for some reason I had never heard of Patricia Wentworth or her amateur sleuth - Miss Silver. So given Elaine's track record I started with this story of murder and deception that takes place during World War II.

The structure of this story is not unusual - James Paradine the patriarch of the Paradines call his whole family together on New Year's Eve to tell them that one of them is a thief and perhaps even a traitor. He tells them he knows the culprit and gives the guilty party until midnight to present themselves in his study. Of course a number of the Paradines have guilty consciences unrelated to the theft and present themselves in the study before (again of course) Paradine is murdered. This sets up the dynamic of multiple suspects all of whom have something to hide.

Like most mystery readers, I look at mysteries as puzzles/challenges that I try to solve along with the detective or detectives. I would say that my success rate is probably fairly low somewhere in the 10-15% level. For some reason in "The Clock Strikes Twelve," I had a hunch about the guilty party even before all of them were introduced. To my surprise (and delight) it turned out that I was right. Not, however, before the story took a number of twists that made me feel I was wrong.

That aside I have to say that once again Elaine has come through with a new author (to me anyway) who's work I really enjoyed. The book is short, just over 200 pages and I read it in a little over two days. Yet it had a complicated plot, interesting characters and I will certainly be back to read more. I am not sure how soon that will be, however, at the moment the novels about British country life suggested by Elaine have even more appeal. In any event I have two more books from this order to read, "Diary of A Provincial Lady" by E. M. Delafield and Mavis Cheek's "Mrs Fytton's Country Life," so we will see how I do with those.