Nursery Tea and Poison

by Anne Morice

  Anne Morice

  Nursery Tea and Poison

  When she turned round I saw that she had a carving knife in her hand.

  Why has Pelham Hargrave returned to his childhood home after twenty-five successful years in Canada and the United States, and is his beautiful and neurotic young American wife quite what she claims to be? Why has a celebrated Hollywood director chosen to retire to a remote English country house, and why does one young woman covet the house and another loathe it? Above all, what is the secret of old Nannie’s power, which allows her to dominate the household from her rocking chair?

  These are some of the questions which confront the soignée Tessa Crichton, actress wife of Scotland Yard detective Robin Price, when she arrives to spend a quiet weekend with her godmother in Herefordshire. One by one the puzzles are unravelled, thanks to Tessa’s spirited and irrepressible curiosity, plus a little help from her husband, but not before two people have died and Tessa herself has narrowly escaped the same fate.

  Nursery Tea and Poison was originally published in 1975. 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

  ‘Relaxing, polished entertainment of high order.’ Daily Telegraph

  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

  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

  1

  Not everything my parents did or attempted to do for me met with my unqualified approval, but I have always considered that in appointing Serena Hargrave as chief godmother they made the right move.

  Despite her own frustrated and disappointing life, with its single halcyon period in her early twenties, she had never once forgotten me at Christmas or on my birthday, had rallied cheerfully to the bedside through measles and whooping cough and, with a sacrifice which only later got through to me, had regularly taken me out from school, to ply me with exotic food and listen to vainglorious and utterly tedious accounts of my performance in the school play. Moreover, these kind attentions had continued even after she married and had a daughter of her own and during her subsequent widowhood and comparative penury.

  It was true that in recent years she had shown a tendency to become strict and unbending in her attitudes, as well as compulsively tidy, but I considered this to be excusable, given her age and circumstances, and it did not detract one jot from my regard and affection. So it was a genuine sorrow to be obliged to quibble when she telephoned one Thursday evening to invite Robin and me to spend the following weekend at her cottage in Herefordshire.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, Serena, but I don’t see how we can. Robin has to go and help out with some case in the Midlands. He’s leaving tomorrow morning.’

  ‘That’s a shame, Tessa, but I can’t pretend that I seriously expected him to drop everything at a minute’s notice, just to suit me. Can’t you come on your own, or are you still caught up in that television series?’

  ‘No, they finished shooting that last week; it’s the problem of transport mainly, you being about a hundred miles from a railway station. Robin will be taking the car.’

  ‘My goodness, Tessa, aren’t our Detective Inspectors provided with official cars for these purposes?’

  ‘Usually they are, but this time he wants to drive up under his own steam and use official transport when he gets to the scene. I’m not sure why. Something to do with this passion for being independent, I suppose.’

  ‘Whereabouts in the Midlands, exactly?’

  ‘Can’t remember, Serena. All I know is that it has to do with some crash on one of the motorways.’

  ‘There now! And he once got so cross with me for not understanding that the C.I.D. or whatever they call themselves had no connection with the traffic police.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true, but you see when they had this crash the other day it turned out that a man who had been found in the driving seat of one of the cars was dead when they got him to the hospital and some gimlet eyed doctor noticed that his injuries weren’t compatible with that kind of accident. So now they think he was put in the car when he was already dead and the real driver engineered this little pile up, switched places with the corpse and then escaped in the general confusion. Quite a smart way of disposing of it, in a sense, only it hasn’t altogether worked out and Robin has been flung into the breach to try and ensure that it doesn’t.’

  ‘What a vile story! Which motorway did it happen on?’

  ‘The M.6, I think.’

  ‘Oh well, that’s all right then.’

  ‘I’m not with you, Serena. How can that make it all right?’

  ‘Oh, not the horrid crime, I don’t mean that, but there’s a turn off from the M.6 not more than ten miles from here, and surely dear, kind Robin wouldn’t object to making a small detour to drop you off? There are two cars here at present, so no problem about getting you to the station for the fast train on Monday, if he can’t collect you.’

  ‘Okay, I can but ask him.’

  ‘Yes, do, there’s a dear. I don’t want to sound selfish, but I really do need some moral support, someone neutral who’s outside the family, if you see what I mean?’

  ‘Why? Is there a war on?’

  Serena laughed: ‘That’s what I’m trying to avoid.’

  I became rather thoughtful on hearing this, because although I have played a few funny parts in my time, both on and off the screen, up till then the role of peacemaker had not been among them. Misconstruing my silence and evidently regarding the matter as settled, Serena began on her thanks and goodbyes, but I cut in just in time to say:

  ‘Hang on a minute, Serena. What’s all this about? For instance, whose car shall I be conveyed to the station in on Monday morning?’

  ‘Well, you’ll never believe this, Tessa, but I’m afraid the answer is Pelham’s.’

&nb
sp; ‘Pelham? You mean he’s in England?’

  ‘Yes, and been staying here for over a week. Not only Pelham, I might add, but his new American bride as well.’

  ‘You stagger me! I didn’t even know he had one.’

  ‘Neither did we, until the day before they landed on us. It has sent Primrose into the full sulks, as you might have predicted, so she’s no help; and Nannie is worse than useless these days. Also I have the impression that Pelham doesn’t entirely approve of Jake as a tenant, and a new American bride is another thing I could very easily do without at present, so, one way and another, matters have reached a rather tricky stage.’

  ‘I can imagine! I expect I’d have come anyway, but if you’d told me all this at the beginning Hell and high water wouldn’t have stopped me.’

  She laughed again: ‘And to think I was afraid of scaring you off!’

  ‘Not a chance in the world. Expect me when you see me, if not sooner.’

  2

  ‘Rather a modest exaggeration, on the whole,’ Robin admitted, when I put the proposal to him that evening. ‘Time and distance being elastic, so far as women are concerned.’

  ‘Does all that mean that the M.6 doesn’t go anywhere near?’

  ‘Well, perhaps not quite so near as it suited her to make out. As I remember, the motorway is about six miles east of Ross, and Serena’s village another eight miles west again. However, I daresay I can accommodate you, if you can be ready to leave by eleven. I’ve one or two things to clear up at this end first and I’d like to get to Wolverhampton not later than four. Who’s Pelham, anyway?’

  ‘Serena’s brother-in-law. Surely you remember Pelham? In a way, his was the oddest part of the whole story. I must have told you.’

  ‘I expect you have, but it was all so long ago. You’ll have to tell me again.’