"Murder à la Mode"

Back when I was in high school, a long long time ago, I was the editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper, which published several times a year. I remember vividly the late night sessions at the printer, the night before the paper was due to be printed, a time of considerable pressure on the entire staff of editors and photographers. Maybe that's why I feel a certain sympathy for the staff of the fictional magazine called Style, which had managed to make itself the arbiter of what was "in" and what was not in the early 1960s London of Patricia Moyes's 1963 novel, Murder à la Mode  That book begins with a late night pre-publication session at Style, the night before a critical issue is to be published on the latest collection of Parisian fashions. As with many such sessions, it will wind up lasting all night. Only at the end of it, one of the editors will be found in her office, dead of poisoning. Inspector Henry Tibbett is going to get a crash lesson in publishing in Murder à la Mode. The book is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the entire review by clicking here.

during the 1950s, Patricia Moyes worked for several years as an assistant editor at London Vogue Magazine. Surely the results of her experience there may be found in the fictional Style magazine, which is at the center of Murder à la Mode, first published in 1963. It was the fourth of nineteen novels to feature Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett and his wife, Emmy. Tibbett is a solid investigator, using with what he modestly calls his “nose” to lead him to sometimes intuitive judgment of the evidence he is collecting – although those judgments are always based on solid grounds which will generally become clear to us. He is frequently helped by Emmy, who is very supportive of her husband. In this book, he is also helped by another member of his family – his niece, a young woman named Veronica Spence, who is a fashion model.

Tibbett is called to the offices of Style when a body is discovered there after that all-night editorial session. He finds himself dealing with a group of extremely temperamental women and men trying to put together a magazine issue that is critical to the continued success of the magazine. At the same time, Tibbett finds that relationships among some of the staff and others involved in the process are, to put it mildly, quite complicated. He also gets the feeling that he’s being told less than the whole truth about those relationships and that he’s being pushed rather strongly towards an interpretation that is meant to give him any number of wrong ideas. Is there a conspiracy among some of his witnesses? Almost any of them could be the murderer – and he will need the unlikely help of his niece (which will cause him considerable grief) before he can unravel a very complex plot.

Patricia Moyes handles the story and the characters with her usual wit and style, and I find Henry and Emmy to be one of the more endearing couples in detective fiction. Here's another book very high on my "recommended" list.

Comments

[Colin McGuigan]

I read my first novel by Moyes about a month or so ago. It was a later book - Curious Affair of the Third Dog - and had a pretty good time with it. I liked the characters and how Moyes wrote in general. I can see myself coming back to her work as it definitely appeals - good puzzles and cluing combined with entertaining characters and a smooth writing style.

[Les Blatt]

Colin, I'm delighted to see Moyes's books coming back and made available to new readers. It's been a while since I read "Third Dog," but I remember it as being very well written, with good twists and a vaguely-recalled ending which left me cheering for the dog. I'll be reading more of hers, as the series re-appears.