I was once locked into a prison cell with Josephine Bell. The incident took place in York Police Headquarters in 1979 and was not, I hasten to add, because we were both apprehended felons. We had been attending a Crime Writers’ Association conference in York and were kindly being shown around by the then Chief Constable of North Yorkshire, Mr Kenneth Henshaw.
Whilst we languished companionably behind bars, Miss Bell revealed her feelings about British crime-writing, expressing the opinion that she did not want to see it slip into a pattern of mere violence and sex as American crime novels were tending to do. ‘In my early days,’ she told me, ‘there was no sex in crime novels. In sensitive places we put a series of dots—now we have to know how to spell the naughty words. As far as I am concerned a crime novel should pose the questions “who dunnit” and “why did they do it” not “who did they do it with”.’
It was a rule of thumb from which, luckily for her readers, she never deviated.
When The House Above the River was first published in 1959, Josephine Bell had been writing for 23 years. She was a Grande Dame of the genre, her name ranking alongside Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers and other greats of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. A founder member of the Crime Writers’ Association, in 1959 she was the Association’s much respected chairman.
The House Above the River is not of the Great Detective school of crime fiction. It is not dominated by a super-sleuth in the mould of Poirot or Maigret. It is crime fiction of the classic puzzle variety, heavily laced with romantic suspense and spiced with a chilling touch of the Gothic.
In the late 1950s Romantic Suspense was riding high. Mary Stewart’s first novel Madam, Will You Talk had been published in 1955 and had struck a deep chord with a large readership. Josephine Bell possessed every trait that made the Stewart novels so popular. She evokes a sense of place, in this case the colourful fishing ports of Brittany, with consummate skill and, without detracting in the slightest from the main thrust of the storyline, she portrays the kind of hero we would all like to have on our side in a time of crisis, and she sustains the mystery until the last page.
In The House Above the River, Josephine Bell indulges her love of all things nautical and puts her knowledge of all things medical (she was a doctor like many of her family), to good use. The hero is Giles Armitage. Holidaying with two friends, Tony and Phillipa Marshall, he is sailing his yacht, the Shuna, along the Brittany coastline. As heavy fog descends he navigates with difficulty into the mouth of the Tréguier river, anchoring below the house of the title, an unkempt and neglected, though inhabited, château.
Unpleasant shocks are in store for Giles. He and his companions are invited to the château by Susan Brockley, a pretty young English girl. Susan is a cousin of the owner, Henry Davenport, and when she introduces Giles to the sickly Henry and to Henry’s dramatically beautiful wife Miriam, Giles is stunned to find himself confronting the woman to whom he was once engaged; the woman who nearly destroyed him when she walked out on him.
His one desire is now to walk out on her, but Miriam Davenport is a woman obsessed by fear, a woman who sees him as her only Saviour. Slowly and inescapably Giles and his companions are sucked into a vortex of evil, enmeshed in a web of malice and greed and revenge and hatred. Murder is the inevitable conclusion. But murder of whom? By whom? And for why?
Without depicting excessive violence or the distasteful and distracting sex scenes of which she was so disdainful, Josephine Bell keeps the reader hooked and teased until the last page. There can be no better recipe for a good book.
MARGARET PEMBERTON