"Miss Christie Regrets" by Guy Fraser-Sampson

Detective Superintendent Simon Collison of Scotland Yard is a bit at loose ends. He’s been lauded by the media for solving his first case (although it was a very near thing), the Yard’s higher-ups want to fast-track him, and he’s not currently assigned to a police unit or station. And all Collison wants to do is gain experience in detective work.

He’s allowed to help at the Hampstead Police Station, and “help” means to wait while the detectives there deal with a recent murder of Peter Howse, who lived in a flat above an art gallery and exhibition house, which used to belong to his family. Someone has struck Howse as he was seated at his desk. Suspects abound, and the police soon discover there are almost too many suspects with too many motives.

Collison doesn’t stay idle for long. A skeleton is found in a suitcase, hidden behind a brick basement wall of the Isokon building. A block of apartments built in the 1930s (and actually a real place)., the building’s most famous tenants were the Soviet agent who recruited the “Cambridge Five” and Agatha Christie. A connection between the skeleton and the murder is made – Peter Howse had been assembling research on the Isokon building for an exhibition shortly to begin. The two cases are consolidated, and Collison takes charge.

Miss Christie Regrets by Guy Fraser-Sampson is the second in the Hampstead Murder series.

Guy Fraser-Sampson

Fraser-Sampson is perhaps better known as an investment funds manager and business consultant. He’s a member of the teaching staff of the Cass Business School in London, an investment columnist, and the author of four books on finance and investment. In the history and fiction areas, he’s written a history of the Plantagenets, a review of cricket from 1967 to 1977 when the color barriers where breaking down, two successor novels to Mapp and Lucia novels of E.F. Benson, and now this Hampstead Murder series.

The story artfully blends the historic of a notable building and the account of the old Soviet spies, swirled together with a contemporary mystery. And Miss Christie posthumously plays a critical role in the investigation.

Miss Christie Regrets, like its predecessor Death in Profile, tells a fast-paced, interesting story and pays tribute to one of the great mystery writers (in the first book, it was Dorothy Sayers and her detective Lord Peter Wimsey). Kudos to Mr. Fraser-Sampson for a second mystery every bit as good as the first.

Related:

My review of Death in Profile by Guy Fraser-Sampson.

Top photograph of the Isokon Building via Wikimedia. Used with permission.

“Death in Profile” by Guy Fraser-Sampson

Detective Chief Inspector Tom Allen of the Hampstead Police Station has been investigating four serial killings of women in the area. Now there’s a fifth, and Allen finds himself replaced by the much younger Detective Superintendent Simon Collison of Scotland Yard. Allen is old school, slogging through solid police work, while Collison is new school, willing to try new approaches to break the clearly dead-ended case.

The MO in each of the killings has been the same. The victims are chloroformed, then raped, then killed with a hammer blow to the head. The fifth killing differs from the first four in the location – the victim was killed where she was found, while the other four had been killed somewhere else and their bodies moved. Other than the manner of death, the victims had nothing in common.

Collison and his team bring in a profiler, and that’s where things become really interesting. The profiler is the live-in partner of a member of the police team, Karen Willis, and he also enjoys acting out – as Lord Peter Wimsey, the Golden Age amateur detective created by Dorothy Sayers.

In Death in Profile, novelist Guy Fraser-Sampson has written an entertaining mystery with more plot twists that you can usually find in police procedural novels. 

Guy Fraser-Sampson

Allen, the displaced chief inspector, quietly continues his own investigation, and makes connections the official inquiry miss. The competition between Collison and Allen could have been keener, but it happens mostly off-narrative.

Fraser-Sampson is perhaps better known as an investment funds manager and business consultant. He’s a member of the teaching staff of the Cass Business School in London, an investment columnist, and the author of four books on finance and investment. In the history and fiction areas, he’s written a history of the Plantagents, a review of cricket from 1967 to 1977 when the color barriers where breaking down, two successor novels to Mapp and Lucia novels of E.F. Benson, and now this mystery novel.

Death in Profile is the first of what’s envisioned as a “Murder in Hampstead” series. I’m looking forward to reading the next installment.

Top photograph: the police station in Hampstead in north London.

A Month with Keats: Keats and Wentworth House

Anita Miller, our guide on the Keats Walk, leads us from Hampstead Heath and back toward the town of Hampstead. We pass a small circus, with circus music and clowns smoking cigarettes behind the big tent. We make our way through the crowds to a narrow street called Keats Grove. About four houses down, we come upon Wentworth House.

John Keats in his study by Joseph Severn

The house was built in 1816, not long before John Keats first encountered it. As our guide and the docent at the house tell us, it was originally what we Americans call a duplex, with a wall dividing the house into two separate residences. The left side was occupied by Charles Armitage Brown, Keats’ good friend and hiking companion, and Keats himself after his brother Tom died in December 1818. On the right was the Dilke family, who moved out and replaced by the Brawne family, including the eldest daughter, Frances, or Fanny, who became Keats’ great love and fiancée.

A meeting room on the left has been added in the recent past, suitable for lectures, poetry readings and other literary activities. Four rooms downstairs mirror four rooms upstairs, divided by the staircase, with the kitchen in the basement.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Wentworth House, known as Keats House today, where Keats wrote some of his greatest poems.

A Month of Keats: Keats and Hampstead Heath

Our Keats Walk in Hampstead in north London, led by guide Anita Miller, has brought us to Hampstead Heath. Our first time on the Heath was a week before, when we visited Kenwood House. Kenwood is on the north side of the Heath, the place occupied by the various earls of Mansfield (and the setting for the 2013 movie “Belle,” which is well worth seeing). The house includes an incredibly fine art collection, including a Rembrandt, a Vermeer, some Constables, a Gainsborough or two, a Van Dyck, and many others.

John Keats by Joseph Severn, 1819

Today we’re on the south side of the Heath (and it’s a big heath). We have just crossed the street from Well Walk and entered what is a forested part of the area.

This is a place John Keats knew well. He would often walk from where he lived on Well Walk across part of the heath to Wentworth House, where his good friend Charles Armitage Brown lived. Brown was the companion who spent 48 days hiking Scotland with Keats, and the friend who would offer Keats a place to live after his brother Tom died in late 1818.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: A forested part of Hampstead Heath.

A Month with Keats: Poetry, Religion and Politics

We’re standing on Church Row in Hampstead, in north London. Church Row is the oldest street in Hampstead, a longish block of attached townhomes lining both sides of the street from the shopping area to the Parish Church of St. John at Hampstead.

Portrait of John Keat by William Hilton, National Portrait Gallery, London

Anita Miller, our guide for this Saturday “Keats Walk,” stops our group of 12 in front of one of the homes in the middle of the block. “This has nothing to do with Keats,” she says, “but notice the windows above each of the doors. Each one is different, because before the era of numbered addresses, that’s how you told people to find your house.”

The houses date from the 1700s, as does the church at the end of the street – 1747, to be exact, although there’s been a church on the property here for more than 1,000 years. It’s the church most associated with John Keats, because it contains a bust of the poet donated by an American admirer in the 1890s. Fanny Brawne, the young woman Keats was engaged to at the time of his death in 1821, was baptized here and attended the church with her family. But Keats, apparently, never set foot inside the building. He was an atheist, after all.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Church Row in Hampstead in north London.