Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
This feminist Welsh Press has come up with a Cosy that’s the antithesis of Noir except that it’s set in the fifties when homosexuality was illegal and murder a capital crime, which lends an unexpected frisson to a work hyped as fun.
The scene is set in Aberystwyth, a Welsh university town where performers arrive a week before Christmas to stage a one-night concert, bringing in their train spouses, entourages, and an element of glamour to a cultured and somewhat cloistered community. But this is an academic backwater with a mystical aura. Halls of residence jostle genteel hotels along a promenade fronting the Irish Sea while further inland the theatricals are accommodated in a magnificent haunted mansion, fully furnished and complete with servants who guard a Cup that is said to be the Holy Grail. The ghost, a harbinger of death, is seen. Murder is waiting in the wings.
Rehearsals for the show are about to start. There is a student choir with four soloists. One, a beautiful Indian girl, becomes sick with “a virus” and dies within the hour. The very speedy autopsy reveals that she was poisoned with jimson weed. Cue the investigators, who present themselves each in the first person: Dame Elspeth Hollanby, a leading actress and National Treasure, and her dresser, Ivy Earnshaw. They are Holly and Ivy (it’s Christmas). Holly, is elegant and fashionable, Ivy is a Socialist and common. The duo tell the story in jokey narrative and dialogue lavish with endearments: their chapters interspersed with pithy sketches from the author stressing ominous but obscure clues that provide suspense. The cast list is long and includes three policemen.
The author misses a trick in failing to explain why she uses the American name “jimson weed” for datura, or the English “thorn apple” nor how the poison was obtained in the first place. But does it matter? The book is a puzzle wrapped in a mystery, not a literary masterpiece. There are more murders and near-misses but the resolution is tolerable. All the suspects have their secrets revealed, the Holy Grail takes a beating; we get an informed history lesson on government from Ivy along with a startling panegyric on Aneurin Bevan, one of the grand old men of Wales, but apart from that odd piece of padding this is less a novel than a script for a TV series of our day featuring powerful women joined at the hip, murder, and males confined backstage or presented as victims, preferably both. Sharp as any Thorn needs no hype; it speaks for itself.
