Murder in Rockwater (1944) by Margot Neville

Despite having several titles by this Australian sister writing duo (Margot Goydor and Anne Neville Goyder) on my TBR pile I haven’t read anything by them since April last year. Of the two I have read by this pair, the first Murder of Olympia (1956) was part of their Inspector Grogan series (and had an interesting tie in with the Melbourne 1956 Olympics), and the second The Hateful Voyage (1956) was a non-series ship-bound mystery. Today’s book under review is their first Inspector Grogan mystery.

Synopsis

‘Money was no object to Clarice Dodd. If you stayed with her at Rockwater you could have caviar for breakfast and champagne for lunch – and at night there would be loads of bright young people in to dance and drink and make Clarice feel like a girl again. The sun shone on her beautiful home beside Sydney Harbour and life seemed so simple; if you wanted anything, you had only to push a bell, or lift up a phone – Clarice would pay. Then, one bright spring morning, as the young houseguests sat on the shady veranda nursing their hangovers, Clarice did not appear to jolly them into life, to pour out the gin she loved to see them drink. In fact, Clarice was never to appear again because she lay in her cool, luxuriously appointed bedroom, dead. Clarice had been murdered.’

Overall Thoughts

The story opens by introducing us to Clarice Dodd’s home and lifestyle and this reminded me strongly of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) in the first couple of passages:

‘If you were staying at Rockwater your day would be something like this: breakfast when you wanted it and what you wanted. There’d be fried chicken livers, maybe, and grilled flounders and savoury omelettes and eggs anyway you liked them an hot scones and clotted cream down from the country with Norah’s famous preserved figs. But if you didn’t fancy any of these things and wanted, say, angels-on-horseback, all you’d have to do would be to give Corsini a ring and presently up would come the oysters. At Rockwater they were always ringing up for things at a moment’s notice. For cigarettes and gramophone records, and when they ran out of gin. And taxis when they couldn’t be bothered getting out one of the cars, and a hairdresser when Clarice wanted her hair done at home, and tennis balls and orchids and chocolates. The shopkeepers were used to it. it was well worth their while. No one checked the bills.’

Furthermore, it is later said in the first chapter: ‘The one thing at Rockwater was to go flat out for what you wanted yourself and not give a damn for what other people wanted. That was the only creed held to there.’ This Gatsby vibe is also touched upon in contemporary reviews of the time as The Observer comments that: ‘Her Murder in Rockwater has, to me at any rate, a totally unexpected location among the Sydney Harbour Smart-Set, which, for sheer orchidaceous rip-roaring “twentyish gossip writers” decadence, makes any of your denizens of the pre-war Mediterranean rubber beaches seem like the Water Babies…’ Incidentally, this is the first time I have come across the word orchidaceous…

However, just as in Fitzgerald’s novel the sparkling and glittering surface of the opulent lifestyle of the character is revealed to be concealing a more tense and dysfunctional household. In particular Clarice demonstrates the darker side to the stock character of the generous host:

‘The mosquitoes sucked Clarice’s blood whenever they got a chance and Clarice sucked everybody’s else’s, but all in a gay friendly motherly sort of way. She sucked them dry of every ounce of effort or ambition in life.’

Furthermore, Clarice tells her nephew that she would die if he left to find a job, yet the narrative complicates this statement:

‘And it was true; Clarice would have died but not because she loved them. Clarice couldn’t love anyone […] She was too old for young men and love affairs, but all the sensations of youth were hers vicariously. The burning passions and unleashed pleasures of Felix and Joyce and the young men and girls who came and went at Rockwater fed her with a continual excitement and made her feel still richly alive. Her blood was redder for the fact that theirs grew pale with soft and decadent living.’

By the close of the opening chapter Clarice is very much set up as a Great Gatsby vampire! Moreover, characters within the story liken her to a Roman emperor, with her generosity and kindness being perceived as deadly.

However, the Neville sisters are smart enough to not depict Clarice’s niece and nephew, nor her other house guests, as completely wronged innocents. For example, her niece Joyce is depicted as vain and self-absorbed and her nephew Felix, despite being the worm who wants to turn and leave the household, is presented as apathetic and as someone who all too easily falls upon alcohol. Nevertheless, Joyce and Felix are not static characters, and we learn more about them as the plot progresses.

Initially Clarice’s death is assumed to be a suicide due to an accidental overdose of sleeping pills. Some suspension of disbelief is required to accept the fact that the devoted, though deemed mentally unstable, older maid named Lena, only reveals after the inquest and the cremation that her mistress could not have taken 18 tablets, as she only had one in the pot remaining. However, this bombshell gets the ball rolling and interestingly, an alternative title for this narrative was Lena Hates Men. This seems like an unusual choice as servants are not often prioritised in titles and secondly Lena’s hatred for men, whilst pronounced, is not overly relevant to the central mystery.

Felix is unsurprisingly the prime suspect for the police, as the incriminating evidence quickly piles up against him, from unfortunate drunken remarks he made prior to the murder to the fact he obtained 18 sleeping tablets from Clarice for a friend a short time previously. His huge desire to leave the household and marry Eileen is regarded as a strong motive for him.

One thing I did not expect was the prominent position given to Eileen in the text, as after the murder we see a lot of events from her point of view. Yet I think this decision makes sense as Eileen holds an outsider status within Clarice’s household, as she is not a family member, nor she is a guest who endorses the excesses of the “Gatsby-esque” lifestyle. Her moderation makes her a kind of counterpoint. Overall, she is a sensible character, although she does have some HIBK moments of jeopardy. Eileen is not the only one who has a romantic interest in Felix and before she arrived, Felix had been flirting with Denise, a long-term guest due to the war. Denise is more in the mould of Clarice in being a bad influence on Felix and she is far from impressed when he stops showing interest in her. The battle for Felix between Denise and Eileen eventually spills out on to the investigation, with the former being prepared to use incriminating evidence about Felix’s sister as a leverage for getting him back.

One thing I have noticed in wartime published mysteries is the sentiment, often expressed by a character, rather than the omniscient narrator, of the jarring sensation between the national/global drive to defeat another group of people and the effort the investigating police team put into solving the murder of one human being. This idea crops up in Murder at Rockwater:

‘Man isn’t a very consistent animal: he’ll send out a couple of million of his fellow humans to hill another couple of million by the most violent means; yet here was all this research going on over the death of Clarice, now a handful of ashes and never at the best of times a very useful member of society.’

I am pretty sure a similar sentiment is espoused in Ngaio Marsh’s Death and the Dancing Footman. It is interesting that the particular conflict of WW2 instilled this idea in the minds of multiple mystery fiction writers of the time. I wonder if other global conflicts have achieved something similar in different time periods.  

This is a quick and pleasant enough read by the Nevilles, although not remarkable. They de-ploy an interesting red herring, but the denouement felt rushed and truncated with Eileen randomly running around the garden at night bumping into people. The choice of killer was not wholly satisfying as key pieces of information come out of nowhere or rely on visual information we do not have. There is a sense of the ending having to tell you things. However, since this is my third read by this writing pair, I think these weaknesses may be due to this being their first detective story and from what I have read I think they are something they improve upon.

Rating: 3.75.5