"Death Comes But Twice" by David Field

It's London, 1902. Dr. James Carlyle of the London Hospital in Whitechapel has discovered something very odd. He’s examining the body of a dead man and discovers his fingerprints match those of a criminal – a man hung some time before. How can a man die twice? 

Carlyle calls upon Matthew West, a Wesleyan minister serving in a mission who’s worked with Carlyle on a previous case. West, as it turns out, was the minister who accompanied the criminal to his hanging. But he didn’t see anything unusual; in fact, he didn’t see anything at all, as he always shuts his eyes when he attends an execution.

 

But West goes to Newgate Prison to look at the visitor ledgers, and he discover that a woman had visited the condemned man four times before his hanging. He also notes who else attended the execution. And then he, Carlyle, and Carlyle’s very modern and outspoken daughter Adelaide discover that everyone involved in the execution are dying one by one. And Matthew West may be next. Com;licating Matthew’s life is the appearance of an older women who seems to be doing her best to seduce the minister.

 

David Field

Matthew is in love with Adelaide, but without a parish of his own and a stable income, he has no means to provide for a wife. For her part, Adelaide seems to go out of her way to keep the minister at arm’s length, even as he helps her with an election campaign. That is, until he’s threatened first with seduction and then bodily harm. 

 

Death Comes But Twice by David Field is the second of four books in the Carlyle & West Victorian Mystery Series. The first is Interviewing the Dead, the third is Confronting the Invisible, and the fourth is Death Among the Nightingales. It’s a historical mystery that has a fascinating premise supported by rich historical detail and a growing romance. That detail includes the then nascent science of fingerprints, which were just coming into use by police organizations but had yet to be tested in court.

 

Field also written six historical novels set in Tudor England and eight novels in the Esther and Jack Enright Mystery Series. A native of Nottingham, England, he practiced and taught criminal law for his professional career. He now lives in Australia.

 

It’s a fun, enjoyable series, full of late Victorian and early Edwardian history.

 

Related:

 

Interviewing the Dead by David Field.

“A Most Inconvenient Death” by Donna Fletcher Crow

It is 1847. Charles Leighton, Viscount Danvers, is at the Ketteringham estate of Sir John Boileau, helping to celebrate the coming of age of Sir John’s son and heir, Jack. It’s quite a gathering, including a duchess and several other titled people. Then, at nearby Stanfield Hall, two members of the Jermy family are murdered by masked men with guns. Boileau, as county magistrate, must investigate, and Leighton helps him.

Suspicions quickly center on a farmer, James Rush. But Leighton isn’t convinced, even if Sir John and the police are. He knows that several people owed money to the Jermys, including Sir John’s son Jack. And Leighton saw Jack leaving with a rifle shortly before the murders occurred.

The investigation of the murders frames the narrative of A Most Inconvenient Death by Donna Fletcher Crow. It’s a Victorian period mystery story that includes a troubled hero (Leighton is still mourning the woman he was to marry), air balloon rides, long English celebrations at country houses that we associate with the 19^th century, a wonderful dowager duchess who might give Maggie Smith some serious competition on Downton Abbey, and even a spot of romance.

Donna Fletcher Crow

Crow is the author of some 50 books, mostly novels about British history. She has two other novels in the Lord Danvers series, Grave Matters and To Dust You Shall Return, and a second mystery novel series under the theme of The Monastery Murders.  A Most Inconvenient Death was originally published in 1993 and republished in 2011 and 2017. Crow lives in Idaho.

The delightful thing about historical mysteries is that they’re never really dated. A Most Inconvenient Death is a Victorian era whodunit involving rich and poor, titled and common, money and debt, constant guessing as to whom the killer (or killers) might be, and one wild climactic ending.

Top photograph: the type of clothing style Lord Danvers would have worn in the 1840s. Courtesy the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Elizabeth Edmondson’s “A Man of Some Repute”

It is 1955. Hugo Hawksworth is an agent with the U.K.’s Special Branch, sent to what is essentially a desk job at a department in rural England. His leg was injured by a shooting in Berlin; he will likely be spending the rest of his life using a cane. In tow is his much younger teenage sister Georgia. Through the assistance of a colleague, Hugo and Georgia settle into temporary lodgings at the castle in Selchester, the ancestral home of the earls of Selchester.

They also settle into a good case of murder. Eight years earlier, the last earl was hosting a dinner party, and apparently walked out into the middle of a blizzard and was never seen again. Without a body, the estate cannot enter probate; there’s no successor to the title of missing earl, as his son and heir was killed during the British occupation of Palestine after World War II. His rather grasping daughter Sonia can’t do anything with the castle until the missing earl’s fate is determined.

And then a leaking pipe requires the digging up of part of the castle’s chapel floor. A skeleton is found, one wearing the ring the earl always wore. And it turns out to be the missing earl. The people who were the earl’s dinner guests, including his now-deceased son and his niece Freya Wryton, turn into suspects. The police are eager, perhaps too eager, to pin the murder on the dead son. But nothing is that simple.

Elizabeth Edmondson’s A Man of Some Repute is complicated, but no more so than any of the kind of English mysteries we associate with Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Ngaio March and other classic English mystery writers. It’s full of hidden papers, family passions, and occasional twists and turns. It held my interest to the very last page.

Edmondson is a writer of historical mysteries. She’s written several set in Italy, the French Riviera, Dorset and even on an ocean liner. The stories are set in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.

A Man of Some of Repute, published in July, is the first of Edmondson’s “Very English Mysteries,” and will be followed later this month by A Question of Inheritance, set in Selchester and with the same leading characters. She also writes as Elizabeth Aston (she is one busy writer!).

Elizabeth Edmondson

Hugo and the Selchester niece Freya work together to try to solve the mystery, with occasional help from the high-spirited sister Georgia and Hugo’s uncle Leo, a Catholic priest. As they learn more about what actually happened on the night of the dinner in 1947, they uncover a series of ugly family stories, with national security implications. And while the book is not a romantic mystery, Edmondson is masterful at creating the expectation of romance between Hugo and Freya, without a single direct reference to any romance at all.

A Man of Some Repute is a fully satisfying mystery. I’m looking forward to its successor.

Photograph by Karen Arnold via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. (The photo is actually of Arundel Castle, similar to but not the actual setting for A Man of Some Repute.)