A Choice of Evils

Those plans for peaceful seaside holidays? They never really work out well, at least not in the world of classic British mysteries. 

Retired professor Andrew Basnett, for example, envisioning little more than sandcastles and the blessings of a pale English sun on his pale English skin, is startled to meet his nephew, Peter, on the beach. He’s yet more startled (and not entirely thrilled) when Peter gets him invited to dinner with a celebrity novelist. And he’s extremely startled when the novelist’s sister-in-law is shot in the summer house and nephew Peter seems the likeliest man for the job. We have often suggested that Andrew Basnett should be known as “Mr. Marple,” because the series’ village settings and pinpoint plotting—and its canny, creaky sleuth—are so pleasingly reminiscent of the tales of St. Mary Mead. But they feature, in addition, a gentle wit that (dare we say it?) Ms. Christie could only dream about, and this final installment is a perfect exemplar.

E.X. Ferrars (Morna Doris MacTaggart) was born in Burma in 1907 and sent at the age of six to a prestigious boarding school in England. After an early marriage and the publication of two novels, in 1940 her life was turned upside-down when she both met Robert Brown and published Give a Corpse a Bad Name, her first mystery and the first in what would become the five-book Toby Dyke series. She and Brown married in 1945 and in 1951 moved to the US, though they returned to the UK only a year later, sickened by America’s turn toward McCarthyism. In 1953 Ferrars helped found the Crime Writers’ Association. The couple lived in Edinburgh for 25 years, during which Ferrars wrote more than 35 mysteries, finally returning to series—first with the Virginia and Felix Freer books and then with Andrew Basnett—in the late 1970s, after a move to Oxfordshire. She died in 1995, having published more than 75 novels and numerous short stories, nearly all of them involving dead bodies.