Here's an English country house mystery with all the ingredients for trouble. Take an aging (but quite fit) professor of genetics, with a lovely young wife more than 30 years his junior. Add another man, much younger than the professor and clearly in love with the other man's wife. Add a strong interest in archaeology and in exploring some of the ancient burial cairns to be found in the north of England, an interest shared by both men. Bring the ingredients to a boil at a remote country home named Scarweather. And add what might rank as the most troubling of the ingredients, the first (at that time, the only) world war. The disastrous results may be found in Scarweather, by Anthony Rolls. It is the topic of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review by clicking here.
Using the pen name "Anthony Rolls," author C. E. Vulliamy wrote four mysteries, of which Scarweather, published in 1934, was the fourth and last. Our narrator is an English barrister named John Farringdale, who will serve as the Watson to our amateur detective, Frederick Ellingham. Farringdale is telling us the story of events which happened at two widely separated times - the days immediately before the Great War (as it was known at the time) and events happening more than a decade later, long after the war had ended.
Farringdale introduces us to his cousin, Eric Tallard Foster, a young man with a passion for archaeology. Through that passion, Eric Foster has met an older man, Professor Tolgen Reisby, a professor of genetics and chemistry described as “a man of prodigious intellect and of wide scientific knowledge.” Reisby, and his much younger wife, Hilda, along with their young daughter, live in the remote house known as Scarweather, in a part of England where there are many ancient burial cairns holding the remains of the prehistoric inhabitants of the region. Eric is invited by Professor Reisby to visit him at Scarweather, possibly to help him excavate some of those burial cairns. The professor also becomes friendly with both Farringdale and Ellingham and frequently invites them to visit.
I have already mentioned the fact that the professor’s wife was more than 30 years younger than her husband. And Farringdale watches, more than a little horrified, as his cousin Eric proceeds to fall deeply in love with Hilda Reisby. It should be noted – and certainly is noted by our narrator – that Mrs. Reisby is devoted to both her husband and their child and also takes a lively interest in her husband’s work. Still, experienced mystery readers will anticipate that this kind of arrangement is unlikely to end well. So when somebody disappears, it will come as little shock to the reader. No body is found, and the police and coroner write the event off as an unexplained tragedy, most likely a suicide. Frederick Ellingham is not convinced, however – but before he can become deeply involved in any kind of investigation the war breaks out, and both Ellingham and our narrator must go off and serve their country on the battlefield. It won’t be until more than a decade later, long after the war, that the events surrounding that disappearance will be re-examined – and a completely different and more devastating explanation will be presented.
To be honest, I suspect most mystery readers will have solved the puzzle long before our surprisingly naïve narrator, but the whole package is delivered with satisfying surprises along the way. There are excellent characters, especially among Professor Reisby’s friends, neighbors and fellow archaeologists who live near Scarweather. Scarweather, by C.E. Vulliamy, writing as Anthony Rolls, is available now in a new edition as part of the British Library’s Classic Crimes series, published in the U.S. by Poisoned Pen Press, with a helpful new introduction by mystery writer and historian Martin Edwards, who says, "it is high time that twenty-first century readers had a chance to enjoy Vulliamy’s idiosyncratic plotting and sly wit." I quite agree.
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