New location, same crime
There’s a Murder Afoot
Vicki Delany Crooked Lane Books
Taking an out-of-town break from regular life can be good not only for living humans, but also for the fictional characters of long-running crime series.
And so it is that Prince Edward County’s Vicki Delany sends the crew of her Sherlock Holmes Bookshop and Emporium series from their little Massachusetts town of West London to the big English capital for what inevitably turns into another adventure, the fifth in the series, in sprightly deduction and luck.
It’s practically a wholesale transfer of major characters, as series protagonist and bookshop operator Gemma Doyle leads her friend Jayne Wilson, owner of Mrs. Hudson’s Tea Room next door to the bookstore, Gemma’s cop boyfriend Ryan Ashburton, local rare book dealer Grant Thompson and retired lawyer and Sherlock Holmes aficionado Donald Morris, to England for a weekend convention all about the classic Holmes universe created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
In some minds, the original’s author was an ancestor of Gemma’s family, but she doesn’t particularly care about that dubious suggestion. Her immediate interest is in visiting her English parents, Henry, a retired Scotland Yard detective, and Anne, an eminent barrister.
She’s less enthused about encountering her sister Pippa, who has a mysteriously powerful career in government and is the object of some sisterly rivalry.
The convention, timed to coincide with the fictional Sherlock
Holmes’s fictional birthday on Jan. 6, is awash in international attendees selling and buying memorabilia, attending lectures and dressing up in Sherlockian period costume.
Gemma is there to receive an award for Sherlock promotional efforts on behalf of her uncle Arthur, whose Massachusetts bookstore she mainly took over when she emigrated from England. She also has some hopes of spotting merchandise interesting enough to import for sale in her U.S. store.
What happens though, naturally, is murder. But first, a previously unknown uncle shows up at the conference, peddling sketches of Sherlock adventures and disturbing Gemma’s parents.
Randolph Denhaugh, Anne’s brother, has been persona non grata since he absconded decades back with a valuable
John Constable painting his and Anne’s parents had counted on for retirement money.
Since then Henry has kept a distant eye on him from his Scotland Yard perch as Randolph bounced around as a ne’er-dowell and made a sort of living as an art forger.
Anne, protected by Henry, has been thoroughly estranged.
But now there he is, buoyantly greeting his wary sister and meeting his nieces, at least one of whom didn’t know he existed. Henry’s open hostility seems to make little difference to Randolph, who also appears to be engaged in a couple of other feuds at the conference.
And then, after the event’s banquet, he turns up dead — with Henry standing over him, injured, dazed and without memory of what just happened.
Unsurprisingly, and thanks in part to a disagreeable police investigator who has an unhappy history with Henry, he’s arrested.
Wittingly or not, Gemma and her friends, relatives and allies take up roles in pursuing possible culprits in Randolph’s death, from tracking down those with whom he’d evidently had tricky relationships, to keeping more naive members of their group otherwise occupied. It helps that Gemma has lots of experience in previous Delany novels poking around fatal crimes. It also helps that Pippa can pull a lot of official and unofficial strings.
If There’s a Murder Afoot isn’t the tightest or most logical of Delany’s Holmes bookshop mysteries, it can still be a bonbon for those for whom mid-winter darkness can be alleviated by a little literary light.
Joan Barfoot is a novelist living in London.