by Anne Morice
Anne Morice
Sleep of Death
He was confronted by the sight of his wife sagging full length on the sofa, where she had been since approximately half past six, when she was strangled to death with one of her own silk scarves.
Death isn’t in the script of the comedy slated to open in London’s West End. But bloody bad luck during rehearsals has convinced actress Tessa Crichton that the first night of Elders and Betters will be its last. Even a charming plot can’t help the doddering old star, Sir Philip Mickleton, who is dying in every scene . . . or the indecisive director, who’s killing the timing; the producer, who’s fatally fouling up the financing; and the leading lady and her lover, who are battling it out in the dressing room. But the finishing touch comes with anonymous letters predicting murder. Fear suddenly takes centre stage as Tessa switches roles from ingénue to detective. A theatre goes dark . . . and somebody dies.
Sleep of Death was originally published in 1982. This new edition features an introduction and afterword by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.
‘The fun lies in the style, light and sweet as a soufflé.” 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
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
I
The opening night of Elders and Betters, a comedy based on the theory that a sixth sense, backed up by a lifetime’s experience, is worth more than the other five put together, had been set for Thursday, 20th May, but Robin told me he would prefer to see it either at a preview or at a later performance, whichever suited me best.
He does not much care for the overheated atmosphere of first nights and furthermore his superiors at Scotland Yard have perfected the art of discovering some urgent and essential business for him on those rare evenings which he has set aside for private engagements. In accordance with some law, which I do not believe has yet been researched and identified, the further ahead the private engagement has been made, the shorter the notice allowed to him for its cancellation. Aware that to be the cause of leaving two vacant seats in the fifth row of the stalls on the opening night would put him in bad odour with the management and company, he preferred to play safe and, since this is a game you can’t win, to spend the evening alone and at home, in front of the television set.
“Then you had better settle for the first preview,” I told him, “which is today week. For one thing, I’ll be able to hear in advance how much you enjoyed it and how wonderful I was, which is bound to boost my morale, whether I believe you or not. For another . . .”
“Oh, do we need another?”
“I’m afraid we’re stuck with it. I have a nasty feeling that the first night could also be the last, and you might miss it altogether.”
“Then shouldn’t I make it the second preview? You’re bound to last as long as that and it would give me a better chance to catch you at your peak.”
“Yes, it would, but the second preview is not for the likes of you, who have to work. It takes place on Thursday afternoon; a few hours before the official opening, in fact.”
“That’s punishing yourselves a bit, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and just about all we needed. As I’ve told you more times than you probably care to remember, it’s not a bad play, quite well constructed and funny, but we’ve been dogged from the start by such rotten luck. No less than two actors being struck down by near fatal diseases halfway through rehearsals must be some kind of a record and it’s gone on like that ever since. If we’d been doing a play about a Scotsman who had a strange encounter with three witches, the going couldn’t have been rougher.”
“So why throw in an afternoon preview, to make it rougher still?”
“It seems that Oliver had no choice. It now turns out that we clash with the opening of the Candida revival, which happens to be a rather more prestigious production, with rather bigger star names, so it was a question of getting the press to a special preview, or not getting them at all.”
“Rather inefficient of him not to have discovered this before, wasn’t it?”
“Well, he is new to the game, in the sense of being out on his own for the first time, but this wasn’t his fault. Owing to a succession of flops, the Coronet became vacant unexpectedly and the Candida lot have cut short their tour and are coming in a week earlier than planned. At least, that’s what I heard and, as far as I’m concerned, it’s just one more instance of the rotten luck which has beset us all the way through. Shall I pour you some coffee?”
“I’d love it, but my time’s up. See you some time this evening! I take it you’ll be rehearsing all the hours your union will allow?”
“Oh, you bet! Unless the roof falls in, which is about the only disaster we’ve so far been spared.”
“Cheer up! Things usually turn out better than you expect.”
“If not worse,” I remarked gloomily, thinking of the long, hard and probably unrewarding day ahead.
There was a flight of stone steps from ground level up to the dressing rooms and that morning I had to take them very slowly because, just ahead of me and making heavy weather of it, was Old Philip Mickleton, K.B.E., our recently recruited star performer. I was careful to give him a good start and to match my pace with his, because one of his few faculties which remained in good trim was his hearing and it seemed likely that, if he were to turn round to see which porpoise was close behind him, he would lose his balance, topple over and send us both hurtling to the bottom.
In fact, it struck me that he was distinctly more tottery than he had been the day before and the sight of his decrepit old figure brought back all the dismal forebodings which my early morning walk through the Park had done much to dispel, for the truth was that at least half the misfortunes which I had been moaning about to Robin could be laid at the door of Sir Philip Mickleton.
He had received his knighthood in the previous year’s Birthday Honours, causing bafflement to a number of people, since he was only a moderately celebrated actor, had never taken on any of the great classical roles and was more renowned for his vanity and ir
ascible temper than for his contribution either to charity or the performing arts. His professional activities over the past few years had been confined mainly to cameo film parts and voice-overs for television commercials.
Various explanations had been put forward for the honour which had been so unexpectedly conferred on him, the most popular being that someone in the Civil Service had goofed. It was a widely held belief in the profession that the man whose job it was to notify the intended recipients had mixed him up with another Philip Mickleton and the real nominee, a successful and influential industrialist based in Edinburgh.
In the nature of things, almost everyone in the company had come in contact with him at one time or another, but I alone could claim the dubious distinction of a special relationship. This had stemmed from the fact that, for a brief period during her early married life, he had been one of my mother’s most ardent, persistent and unsnubbable admirers and, at about the time when I was four or five years old, had been a frequent visitor at our house, often seeking to curry favour with the chatelaine by plying me with unsuitable toys and treats. Nowadays it amused him to pretend that this had created a unique bond, almost a blood relationship one might have supposed, which could never now be severed.
Ironically enough, the decline into comparative obscurity had eventually worked in his favour, because when Freddie Marloe, who had been engaged for the leading role of the grandfather, was snatched from our midst by a thrombosis, during the third week of rehearsals, Philip had turned out to be one of the very few actors of suitable age and style who was immediately available to take over. At the time, though, the replacement had not been made without certain misgivings and these had increased with every day that passed. However, as I had explained to Robin, Oliver Welles, who was presenting the play, and Tim McCartney, our director, had really had no choice. It was Oliver’s very first West End venture, after setting up in management on his own, and his whole future, not to mention some heavy financial backing, was at stake. The play, when it opened, might flounder or succeed, its outcome being one which no one could ever predict, but in the meantime the first essential was to stick as rigidly as circumstances would allow to the schedule which had been laid down.
