Reprint of the Year Award 2023: Nomination 2

Last week saw 10 bloggers, including myself, posting up our first nominations for the 2023 Reprint of the Year Award. If you missed those posts here is a link to my own, which contains links to all the other nominations.

Today we’re doing it all over again, with our second and final nominations.

Bev – Blind Man’s Bluff (1943) by Baynard Kendrick

Brad – The Birthday Murder (1945) by Lange Lewis

Hayley – Suddenly at His Residence (1946) by Christianna Brand

Janet – Death of an Author (1935) by E. C. R. Lorac

John –The Black Lizard (1934) by Edogawa Rampo (Trans. Ian Hughes)

Karen – Let X Be the Murderer (1947) by Clifford Witting

Puzzle Doctor – The Black Spectacles (1939) by John Dickson Carr

Moira – The Drowning Pool (1950) by Ross Macdonald

Rick – Fools Die on Friday (1947) by A. A. Fair

This week for my own nomination I am returning to a favourite author of mine, one who I actually nominated last year. That would of course be Joan Coggin, who wrote the four Lady Lupin mysteries from 1944 to 1947. In 2022 I nominated the final Lupin mystery, Dancing with Death (1947), which had been reprinted by Galileo Publishing and this title ended up coming 9^th in the final results. This year Galileo Publishing have reprinted the first Lupin mystery, Who Killed the Curate? (1944) and I am curious to see how well this book does in the polls, in comparison to Dancing with Death.

To get you up to speed here is a quick outline of what Who Killed the Curate? is all about:

‘Lady Lupin Lorimer Hastings is the young, lovely, scatter-brained and kind-hearted wife to Andrew, the vicar of St Mark’s parish in Glanville, Sussex. When, on Christmas Eve, Andrew’s unpopular curate gets himself murdered, things all get a bit overwhelming for poor-out-of-her-depth Lady Lupin. She enlists society pals, Duds and Tommy Lethbridge, as well as Andrew’s nephew, a British secret service agent, to get at the truth. Lupin refuses to believe that Diana Lloyd, 38-year-old author of children’s detective stories, could’ve done the deed and casts her net over the other parishioners. But all the suspects seem so nice – very much more so than the victim.’

This mystery ticks a lot of boxes. It’s a Christmas-set mystery. It’s centred on a village, whose way of life is very different to what the amateur sleuth is used to. Speaking of the amateur detective, Lady Lupin is one of the most enjoyable comic amateur sleuths in crime fiction. Yvette from Yvette Can Draw wrote in her review of this novel that ‘the primary reason for liking the book is Lupin Lorrimer Hastings herself’. Meanwhile Lelia from Buried Under Books noted that:

‘Lady Lupin is a complete delight, one of the best cozy characters I’ve ever encountered. Watching her navigate the pitfalls of being the vicar’s wife in a small village is hilarious, especially since she’s usually oblivious to what’s really going on. Like many such addlepated people, though, there is much more to Loops than meets the eye.’

Crime fiction is not lacking in village mysteries, yet I think Coggin manages to make hers stand out from many of the others. One contributory factor for this is the disconnect between Lady Lupin and the village itself. Her previous unmarried life was completely alien to Mother’s Union and Guides meetings and her past experiences had not left her overly prepared for the numerous problems parishioners bring to her door. Furthermore, the comedy surrounding this situation works so well because it is grounded in reality. This might seem like a surprising comment to make, but when I reviewed this book a few weeks ago more fully, I had a delightful post comment testifying to the accuracy of the remark Lupin makes regarding the busy nature of vicarages:

“I wouldn’t not be married to Andrew for anything, but my advice to young girls who want to marry clergymen is ‘don’t,’ unless you like spending your life in a railway station with total strangers coming up and telling you their life histories every moment.”

When I re-read this book last month, something new which struck me was the parallels between Griselda in Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) and Lady Lupin, who are both unlikely vicar’s wives. So, fans of Griselda might find this an enjoyable series to try and the beauty of this being a series with Lupin at the centre, is that we get to see her mature over time. This transformation is harder to observe with Griselda as she doesn’t get much in the way of follow up appearances. The only springing to mind at the moment is in 4:50 from Paddington (1957).

In addition, Who Killed the Curate? aleans into the comedy styles we see in P. G. Wodehouse’s work and also in the Christie characters, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. This is something Erin Britton mentions in her review of the book on Crime Fiction Lover, seeing the mystery as ‘something of a mashup of’ the two. This is an addictively quotable book and series in general, but one of my favourite passages concerns Lupin and her husband, Andrew, one morning after she has been dreaming about her past life. Andrew says to her:

“I wish you wouldn’t call out other men’s names in your sleep, darling,” complained Andrew the next morning at breakfast. “The best vicar’s wives don’t do that sort of thing.”

Lupin looked thoughtful for a moment.

“How do you know?” she inquired.

This is a book which is built upon dialogue and its plot is shaped by its characters and the mishaps they have, which I see as one of its strengths. The Northern Reader does too, commenting that:

‘The major strength of this memorable book is the characters and their reactions to mystery of who killed the curate, and why. It is a really funny slice of rural life in the 1940s and is full of observations of the lives of women who have often been overlooked. It is perhaps easy to just think of this book as a comedy and not realise the statements that Coggin is making about the lives of women at the time, whether frustrated, struggling to cope with secrets, and just trying to make sense of life.’

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All the blogger nominations have now been put forward, so don’t forget to submit your own nominations to the comments section of the following post. On the 18th I shall be putting the reader nominations into a generator online to randomly select three to include in the final poll, which will go live the same day, and the results will be announced on the 30^th December.