The Black Shroud (1941) by Constance and Gwenyth Little

This is my third Little novel this year, which I luckily found in a job lot of books. Like Murder Gone Mad (1931), today’s review is another snowy November read, which of course is well timed with our current weather …

 

If you’ve read a Little mystery before you’ll be familiar with the plot elements I am going to mention, as the Littles decidedly had a pattern to their work. Fortunately for us it is a rather splendid and entertaining one.

Diana Prescott has left a comfortable family home to try her luck as an actress, eschewing the life pattern her father set out for her: ‘settle down, get married, and reproduce myself.’ Living at Mrs Markham’s boarding house, she soon makes friends with the owner’s daughter Barbara, as well as the other various boarders: two thirty something school teachers, a bank worker, a fairly dotty old lady, an ex-actress and two spinster sisters, Imogene and Opal Rostrum. Whilst these latter two begin to act strangely, eventually disappearing, Diana is confronted with a new boarder, who she knows works at her father’s canning factory. She is convinced that he has been sent down by her father to woo her back home and she is far from impressed, planning on getting as much good times and fun nights out as possible from Dennis Livingstone, without it coming to anything, especially not her coming back home. Of course her plans do go somewhat awry when the less than with it Miss Giddens complains of a woman who won’t leave her room… In keeping with a typical Little plot, Diana, Barbara and Dennis do some amateur sleuthing to varying degrees, though the latter of course cannot be entirely trusted as new information comes to light. Add the arrival of Diana’s father and you’re set for a gloriously comic ride.

Overall Thoughts

After some less than brilliant reads I was pleased to get onto this one. You can rely on the Littles for a good read, with a writing style that embeds its comic touches so seamlessly that it is hard to give any examples, without quoting paragraphs at a time. The boarding house setup is one the Littles recreate very well and it lends itself to their writing strengths, namely character development and relationships, alongside crisp dialogue and building up of increasingly bizarre events until death occurs and then keeps on occurring. The comically combative relationship between Diana and her father is a real treat to read. Hard to fault them really. The mystery element is perhaps not the hardest to solve in the world, but nor does the solution come upon you immediately. You arrive at the solution at the right sort of time, not too early that the rest of the book is boring, but not too late either. This is the sort of book which should have been adapted in the 1940s and 50s for film, starring Carey Grant of course as Dennis. All of this book screams classic comedy romance film, though I think the romance/relationship side of things is very well written and not as straight forward as you might think.

Thankfully this book is not impossible to find online as I have spotted it on a few sites, so whether you’ve read any Little novels or none at all I can definitely recommend this book as a strong example of how comic crime should be written.

Rating: 4.5/5

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