Milham in the Moor was one of those idyllic little English villages so beloved of many Golden Age mystery authors and their readers. You could argue that the main drawback to Milham in the Moor was its location - several miles away from the next nearest residences along the North Devon coast. Still, it seemed like an ideal place for Dr. Raymond Ferens and his wife. He was looking to buy a practice somewhere relatively quiet, where his nerves could continue recovering from his experiences as a prisoner in a Japanese war camp. Dr. Ferens, and his wife, Anne, found the village to be quite open to them - although there was, of course, that slight chill of formality, the feeling in town that these newcomers weren't completely to be trusted.
But all seemed quiet - until the Ferens's got to meet their close neighbor, the woman called Sister Monica, the warden of a nearby home for displaced and troubled children called Gramarye. The village residents said she was a saint. Anne Ferens said that she was pure evil. Certainly she was an accomplished liar and a bad enemy to have. She also enjoyed learning other people's secrets and might well have found ways of using those secrets to her own advantage.
So as tensions rose in the village, it really came as no shock when Sister Monica's body was discovered in the nearby mill-race, the narrow but powerful flow of water that causes a mill's wheel to turn. And that death brought Scotland Yard's Chief Inspector MacDonald and his assistant, Detective Inspector Reeves, to Milham. What they found there was a most effective conspiracy of silence - for the townspeople were determined to say as little as possible about Sister Monica and her death. You'll find the details in Murder in the Mill-Race, a 1952 mystery by E.C.R. Lorac. It's the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.
Whichever way the Scotland Yard detectives turned, they were met with silence. The villagers who did speak to them insisted that Sister Monica just come over dizzy, poor soul, and banged her head and rolled into the mill-race and drowned. Macdonald and Reeves will have to find a way to break through the conspiracy of silence which stands between them and the true solution to Sister Monica’s death – and it should be noted that this death was not the only mystery in Milham in the Moor. Not by a long shot.
E.C.R. Lorac’s Murder in the Mill-Race is, I think, one of the best of her novels that I have encountered so far. It was recently re-published as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, which is published in the U.S. by Poisoned Pen Press, a Sourcebooks imprint. This edition features an introduction by mystery historian Martin Edwards with more information about this unjustly neglected author.
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