I Met Murder

Murder and Felix have the habit of turning up—and turning up together—in Virginia Freer's life, like some macabre set of twinned bad pennies. 

This time around, a broken leg and the resulting need for soothing ministrations have led Felix to take up residence in Virginia's spare bedroom, giving him a front-row seat to the dramatic doings in the neighborhood.

These mostly involve Virginia's friend Ann Brightwell, who has simultaneously come into a legacy and offered a home to a suddenly orphaned young cousin. The excitement only ratchets up when the cousin disappears and a ransom is demanded. Ann is prepared to sell her newly valuable goodies if it will bring her back, but Felix, cynic that he is, isn't sure that's the wisest course of action. He points out, among other things, that the cousin has a history with the police, and that a local mystery writer seems to be taking a curiously keen interest in the whereabouts of this...quite nubile young woman he's only barely met.

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 (as E.X. Ferrars), 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 crime novels, finally returning to series mystery—first with the “Virginia and Alex 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.