Checkmate to Murder was published in 1944, when E. C. R. Lorac was at the peak of her powers. This domestic murder puzzle captures the febrile atmosphere of wartime, a period of British history when blackouts, fire-watching, and air raid precautions were an everyday fact of life.
The story opens on a foggy evening in London. A group of people are to be found in or around the large Hampstead studio of artist Bruce Manaton. At one end of the fifty-foot-long room, Manaton is painting the portrait of an actor, André Delaunier, who is resplendent in the scarlet robes of a cardinal. At the far end, two men are hunched over a game of chess. They are Robert Cavenish and Ian Mackellon, both of whom are highly respectable individuals who work for the government. Rosanne Manaton, sister of Bruce and also an artist, who is cooking supper in the adjoining kitchen, occasionally pops in to the studio. A cleaning lady, Mrs Tubbs, is also bustling about the place. Everything seems calm, but this peaceful scene is about to be interrupted by murder, and before the end of the story the lives of several of those present will be changed forever.
Suddenly a special constable bursts in on the gathering. He tells Manaton and the others that he has chanced upon a body in the next door building. The dead man is called Folliner; he was a miser and his money has gone missing. Verraby, the special constable, believes he has already caught the murderer—a young Canadian soldier who is a great-nephew of the victim and who made a run for it when he was about to be arrested. When Verraby hands the culprit over to the official police of Scotland Yard, it seems that he has presented them with an open-and-shut case.
Lorac’s series investigator, Detective Chief Inspector Macdonald, nevertheless suspects that all may not be as it seems. Macdonald is shrewd and compassionate, but also relentless. As he and his team delve deeper, they uncover a tangle of potential motives. Even the behaviour of the special constable is open to serious question—is his dabbling in property speculation a clue to the crime? And what really did happen to the old man’s money?
The war-time setting and atmosphere are integral to the mystery. As Bruce Manaton says, “Londoners have heard so many bangs during their recent history, that a pistol shot isn’t so impressive a row as it used to be.” Macdonald agrees: “I suppose all Londoners who survived the winter of 1940 with nerves unimpaired, did develop what the psychologists call a ‘defence mechanism’—they learned to disregard disessential bangs.”
Today, more than three-quarters of a century later, it is fascinating to read an account of a domestic crime committed at a time of national crisis. A minor character called Miss Stanton expresses the prevailing mood: “Bombs I can disregard—we’re all in it together—but crime and corruption and disreputability—it’s too much.”
Caroline Rivett, who wrote both as E. C. R. Lorac and as Carol Carnac, was herself a Londoner. Born in Hendon in 1894, she attended the South Hampstead High School and the London School of Arts and Crafts. She published her first detective novel in 1931; this was The Murder on the Burrows, a well-crafted debut which launched Macdonald on a career that was to last for more than a quarter of a century.
Nine Lorac novels were published by Sampson Low, earning increasingly favourable reviews, before she moved to the more prestigious imprint of Collins Crime Club in 1936, with Crime Counter Crime, set during a General Election. She remained a Crime Club stalwart for the rest of her life. John Curran, historian of the Crime Club, argues that she was especially well served by the designers of the cover artwork for her books, and this is no doubt one of the factors that has made her work especially collectible. First editions in the attractive dust jackets of the period can now change hands—on the rare occasions when they come on to the market—for thousands of pounds.
She was equally at home with urban and rural settings. Her early books include Murder in St John’s Wood and Murder in Chelsea, while two other books set in London, Bats in the Belfry and the war-time mystery Murder by Matchlight, have already been published in the British Library’s Crime Classics series and by Poisoned Pen Press in the U.S. Like Rosanne Manaton, she was artistic and had an interest in ski-ing; the winter sport plays a central part in her Carol Carnac novel Crossed Skis, also published by the British Library and Poisoned Pen Press.
In November 1940, having been evacuated to Devon, she wrote to a friend about the horrors of living through a war. Referring to the death of one of her oldest friends, killed while fire-fighting, she said: “Most of my other friends have been bombed or burnt out of their homes. What a sickening insanity it all is.”
By the time Checkmate to Murder was published, she had moved up north, to Aughton in Lancashire, to be near her sister, Maud, and brother-in-law, John Howson. They are all now buried in the graveyard at Aughton church, along with a third sister, Gladys. In the years before her death in 1958, Carol Rivett became a popular figure in the village while continuing to work productively as a detective novelist. To this day, she is remembered in the local community as spirited and strong-willed, a woman with a strong social conscience. Macdonald, a quiet but utterly single-minded detective, embodies both her determination and her humanity.
Martin Edwards