Mysteries Ahoy!

Back at the start of the year I posted about my excitement at finding an affordable vintage crime novel in a local second hand book store. Since then I returned to the same book store and found that they had acquired used copies of most of the rest of Elizabeth Daly’s works. It was a pretty simple decision to go ahead and buy up their stock for a rainy day…

That previous experience of Daly was with her last book, The Book of the Crime, so it is nice to be able to jump back and start the Gamadge series at the beginning. Unexpected Night introduces us to Daly’s antiquarian bookseller sleuth as he finds himself pulled into a case as an expert in handwriting analysis.

The story concerns Amberley Cowden, a young but very sickly man who will inherit a great fortune if he lives past midnight when he reaches the age of majority. He and his family check into a hotel where he celebrates his birthday only to sneak out from his room during the night. When his body is found at the foot of a cliff it appears he has met with an unfortunate accident but the timing of the death, so soon after he inherited his fortune, leads the authorities to want to look at the matter more closely.

As set-ups for mysteries go, this makes for a pretty intriguing start to a case. Why was Cowden walking along the cliffs so late at night? If he was killed, why do it so soon after he reached his birthday and knowing that a natural death would likely occur within the next year or two? There is a lot to make sense of – fortunately Gamadge is up to the task!

When I wrote about The Book of the Crime one of my complaints was that I felt that we didn’t really get to know Daly’s sleuth. While I think he is not sketched in enormous detail here either, I did feel I had a better grip on his personality throughout the novel and understood why he was curious about particular details of the investigation.

One of the big challenges with any amateur detective is creating a credible reason that they might find themselves involved in an investigation. I appreciated that Daly does not shy away from this problem, having Gamadge say pretty bluntly that he is not really qualified to help on several occasions and quickly steering the investigation away from his area of expertise (though not in such a way that it becomes irrelevant). After a while however his curiosity is clearly aroused and he finds himself drawn to protect one of the family members who he sees as vulnerable, creating a compelling reason for him to keep investigating.

One of the nicest things about the character is that he exudes a warmth that I am not used to from several of the more famous series detectives of this period. He cares about the people involved in this case and works hard to take their feelings into account as he pursues the truth. This connection to his humanity is rather refreshing and I also appreciated that he never really feels the need to show off his skills – his ego being confined to his own area of professional expertise.

Daly also introduces an interesting dynamic between him and the Police, having him work as a sort of informal consultant. This works nicely as it allows them to share information but it also enables her to show how Gamadge possesses a brilliant and creative mind, building him up without diminishing the police (also fairly unusual in my experience of this era of detective fiction). Essentially the contrast comes down to one of flexibility – Gamadge dares to question some of the details of the case taken as facts and, in doing so, is able to envisage the case in a different way.

In her review (I have linked below), Kate suggests that Daly does not offer quite enough evidence to back up some aspects of the conclusion. I think that it is true that Gamadge should not be able to prove his case with the evidence the reader has been given at the moment of the reveal and, thus, the book perhaps doesn’t quite play fair. That being said, I do see how Gamadge’s solution (even lacking evidence to prove it in a court of law) could be seen to offer a tidiness that no alternative reading of the facts would allow. The way Daly opts to have the case proved though is quite lazy, relying on a third party to confirm a significant chunk of the solution he could otherwise only guess at and I do think it is those final two chapters feel a little rushed and unsatisfying as a result.

There are many other aspects of the book that I responded very well to however, not least the interesting cast of suspects Daly develops. Cowden’s family make up an interesting blend of types, clearly all financially dependent on their relative to some extent. Daly does a good job of allowing their personalities and feelings towards Amberley to emerge over the course of the novel as I found that I remained uncertain of several characters’ motivations and sincerity until close to the end of the novel. This added to the intrigue of the situation and made aspects of the conclusion all the more compelling to me.

I also appreciated the wonderful descriptions of the small theatre that Atwood has created on an old pier with the actors using tents on the sand for changing rooms and all the small cast having to double or triple up on parts. I found this an easy location to imagine and felt that Daly did a good job of bringing her cast of theatrical characters to life.

All in all, I found this second experience with Gamadge to be a much more satisfying encounter than my first. The mystery, while not perfectly clued, is engaging and presents a solid puzzle for the reader to solve and I found the sleuth entertaining company for a couple of hours. As I noted at the start of this article, I own most of Daly’s works so I am confident that I will be returning to experience more of his adventures soon.

Vintage Mysteries Challenge: At least two deaths with different means (How)

Further Reading

Kate @ CrossExaminingCrime found the book uneven, though she had praise for the sleuth himself and Daly’s writing style. I cannot disagree with her opinion that the evidence for the conclusion rests a lot on a statement from a third party.

Les @ Classic Mysteries suggests that while this is an entertaining read, it is far from Daly’s strongest work. He suggests that as they do not need to be read in order that some may want to start with a later title and then return to this.