One year ago, Rosemary Reeve disappeared on the eve of the Hunt Ball, and tragedy is about to repeat itself again. Nicholas Brent won the right to drive the much-desired Dilys Maine home from the ball, but on nearing her home, they found a body in the road, a body that had been seemingly deliberately driven over.
Brent sends Dilys home across the fields and heads to a nearby farmhouse to call for help, only to be attacked by an intruder. When the police arrive in the form of Inspector Waring, it becomes clear that Brent stumbled upon a murder. Is it linked to Rosemary’s disappearance? It’s hard to say when nobody seems to know who the victim in the road actually was?
E C R Lorac’s last published novel was Dishonour Among Thieves in 1959, but the operative word there is “was”. In some papers that belonged to Edith Caroline Rivett (aka Lorac aka Carol Carnac) there was discovered an unpublished novel – this one – and now, thanks to Martin Edwards, collector James M Pickard and the British Library, there is one more title in her official canon.
Note, it’s not an Inspector MacDonald mystery, it is a standalone mystery. In Martin’s introduction, he says that the cover had the author’s name as Mary Le Bourne. Was this just a habit of hers, or was this perhaps an attempt to start a new pseudonym? Rivett was only 64 when she died after a short bout of ill health, so she might have expected to have many more books in her.
If that is the case, I wonder who the series character was supposed to be? This is one of those titles where you’re never quite sure who the sleuth is supposed to be, and a number of characters seem to stumble to the truth at the same time. Is it supposed to be Inspector Waring? Nick Brent? Dilys? Brent’s friend, MacBane? We’ll probably never know.
But it’s a late book from the writer and that often doesn’t bode well. So many writers do their best work in their early or middle careers, so I’ll be honest, my excitement at this wasn’t exactly at its highest. Curiosity, yes, but not really excitement. However…
… it’s really rather good. The characters are interesting, and, if you can turn a blind eye to probably too many people knowing what happened in the past, there’s some really nice interactions between them, along with a few surprises on the way from how you might expect things to play out. And what is more, there is a damn fine trick played by the murderer. One of those tricks where the writer just dangles it under the reader’s nose – I even noticed the dangling – and yet I didn’t put two and two together. It’s that perfect thing – a clue in plain sight that I completely missed.
It’s not perfect – one character never seems to make an actual appearance, for example, and some behaviour doesn’t make perfect sense, characters choosing to sit on knowledge, rather than act on it. It does all build to an effective and satisfying conclusion, and overall, this is a satisfying mystery, even more so as I didn’t expect it to be. The campaign to elevate Rivett to the official title of Crime Queen (if they can only be four, then we can lose Dame Ngaio) begins here!
Two-Way Murder is out now from the British Library.
In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel 
I got my copy yesterday so I am looking forward to giving this a try, having read your review.
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Thanks for the review, and glad to here there’s a good mystery in this one – I’ve always found that Lorac writes strong narratives and stories, rather than strong puzzles.
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P.S. Incidentally, haven’t you already read and reviewed the book for ‘next on the blog’? I seem to recall getting hold of a copy at your recommendation.
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Yes, you are correct. In fact, I remember it vividly for there was a quarrel regarding my comment !
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Well, there is a Search function on the blog to check…
Yes, I have read it before, but it’s not the first time I’ve re-read a book for the blog. Blame my book club.
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I’ve also read and enjoyed this, despite one or two rough edges. Even if it had been published under a new pseudonym, it would have been easy to identify it as her work from the fingerprints (using “Glory!” as a mild expletive, the phrase “There’s this to it”, etc).
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Lorac’s pretty good, but she’s no Josephine Tey
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Only read The Daughter Of Time and found it massively over-rated, based on a false premise. Never gone back.
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I’m not sure Tey’s style is fixed enough to be experienced in just one of her books. She wrote different styles of mysteries over the years. That said when I re-read some a while back I found I enjoyed them less. The Franchise Affair and Bratt Farrar might be the best choices if you ever decided to risk another go. The former made for quite a good film.
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I know I’m committing exactly the same sin as I accuse Barzun and Taylor of, dismissing a writer, Brian Flynn in their case, on the strength of one book. Maybe one day… Might even read a second Sayers book…
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Which Sayers did you read?
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Whose Body. In my early days, I started a couple of others – Gaudy Night definitely- but didn’t get far.
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This gives me hope that Anthony Boucher’s The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole and Christianna Brand’s The Chinese Puzzle will one day make it to the printers.
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I’ve managed to read most of Sayers over the years. They would be better
but for that insufferable Peter Wimsey. My favourite is ‘Nine Tailors’. He’s less irritating and the dreadful Harriet Vane isn’t in it.
I thought ‘Daughter of Time’ was vastly over-rated but I’m quite a Tey fan. ‘Miss Pym Disposes’ is my favourite one of hers.
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I agree ! Wimsey and his incarnation in the form of Ian Carmichael has me
hitting the off switch in record time . ! The snobbery is insufferable !
Not a great Tey fan either . I settled down with The Singing Sands and was
looking forward to a Hebridean adventure . Next thing I knew we’d been whisked off to foreign parts by a ludicrous plot that bore no relationship to
what had gone before .? Miss Pym was a treat – particularly for devotees of
Sappho….
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“one character never seems to make an actual appearance”
Hmm, I did not notice that. Who are you thinking of?
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The father. There are a couple of times that our hero says he has spoken to him, but we never see those conversations. Felt like some scenes were missing.
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We get a couple of scenes of him with his child, but you are right we don’t see the sleuth talk to him. At the summing up the sleuth mentions statements from him, which is fair enough, but I did not notice any other references to missing conversations.
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