Friday's "Forgotten Books: Death of an Old Girl

Elizabeth Wharton Lemarchand (1906-2000) was born in Barnstaple, England, and spent most of her life as a headmistress. When she was forced to retire early due to an illness, she turned her hand to short stories, with some success. By this time, she was in her 60s, but long a fan of the Golden Age authors of detective fiction, she decided to give novels a try herself, creating the investigative team of  Superintendent Tom Pollard  and Sergeant Gregory Toye.

The author once remarked that "I employ only settings of which I have some personal knowledge," which is why it was a no-brainer for her first novel in 1967, Death of an Old Girl, to be set at a boarding school for girls. She may have taken some inspiration, too, from one her Golden Age idols, Agatha Christie, who had penned her own boarding-school mystery, Cat Among the Pigeons, a few years earlier in 1959.

In this inaugural Pollard and Toye story, the detective pair are called in to investigate when an "old girl" (alumna) of the Meldon School for Girls is found murdered in a puppet theater at the end of the annual Old Girls' Reunion weekend. The old girl in question, Beatrice Baynes, had criticized the new administration, the new teaching staff and the new curriculum, but that hardly appears motive for murder. But soon the suspects begin piling up, headed by the victim's lazy nephew George and timid god-daughter Madge who both stand to inherit a tidy sum of money, as well as the school's cast of characters, including the headmistress, art teacher and groundskeeper. As Pollard meticulously pieces together every second of the victim's last moments alive, he begins to learn he's going to have to identify the killer first in order to uncover the motive, with a little help from Pollard's perceptive wife, Jane.

As with most third-person omniscient narratives, Lemarchand's characters aren't fully fleshed out, but it's not surprising there is a great deal of attention to setting; the author once wrote an essay for City and Shore: the Function of Setting in the British Mystery, in which she said

"I wonder why my books are so WHERE dominated...I think the most likely explanation is that I first came to detective fiction in the Golden Age of the 20s and 30s and have ever since been under the spell of the master craftsmen of the period such as Dorothy L Sayers and Freeman Wills Croft. It was their vivid portrayal of the settings in which their impeccable plots unfolded that made the whodunits of this time to absorbing to me. The action was intimately associated with and conditioned by the milieu in which it took place, and this gave it conviction."

Fans of today's faster-paced crime fiction novels may find this book a bit tedious and difficult to wade into, with a heavy emphasis on timetables and a lot of static discussions, but if you stick with it, it's an entertaining nod to the Golden Age complete with the stereotypical small English village, a closed set of characters, rules of fair play and a who-dunnit puzzle. FYI, the BBC Afternoon Plays (1984 - 2002) dramatized Death of an Old Girl, if you ever happen to run across it, although it's probably as hard to find as Lemarchand's book are these days, mostly out of print.