Fire in the Thatch is an enjoyable example of E.C.R. Lorac’s ability to impart a distinctive flavour to the traditional detective story. The setting is rural Devon, and Lorac’s fascination with country life, and with people who “care about the land”, is evident from first page to last.
Colonel St Cyres, a sympathetically portrayed landowner, is about to grant a tenancy of Little Thatch, a rather neglected property on his estate. His quarrelsome daughter-in-law June, who is staying with him because her husband is being held prisoner by the Japanese in Burma, urges him to allow her friend Tommy Gressingham to take the property. But the Colonel’s daughter Anne fears that June’s motives are less than honourable, and the tenancy is ultimately granted to Nicholas Vaughan, a stranger who has turned up in the area after being invalided out of the Navy. Undaunted, Gressingham moves to a house in the neighbourhood, but unlike the reclusive Vaughan, he has no interest in cultivating the land. He is an entrepreneur whose ambition is to build a country club.
The tension between the old way of life in rural England and the march of progress is sharpened by the timing of the events of the story, set as the Second World War is drawing to a close (although the book was not published until 1946). Lorac creates a vivid picture of an apprehensive society, including small social details that make the story especially interesting to a twenty-first century reader. People realise that change is in the air, but many of them fear the form that change will take.
Gressingham, however, scents the opportunities: “Farming’s done well during the war, but it’s not going to do so well in future…In five years’ time quite a number of land-owning gentry will be glad to realise a good figure for their property.” His friend Howard Brendon, a lawyer turned businessman, is more sceptical: “In five years’ time the sale of land will be controlled. What you refuse to realise is that this country is going to swing to the left, and the hell of a long way, too.”
We are also given an insight into the conflicting attitudes of country folk and Londoners. Some villagers resent being ordered to offer billets “which would bring bombed-out townsfolk into farms and cottages. ‘We don’t want them here and we can’t do with them.’” But Anne St Cyres, at least, does not lack “the imagination…to realise the distresses of those who are strangers.” Reading this book, and thinking of debates current at the time of writing, about immigration and the plight of homeless refugees, one is reminded that, whilst the detail of social problems keeps changing, the fundamentals of human nature—both positive and negative—are enduring.
Four chapters set the scene before we are fast-forwarded to a conversation between Commander Wilton and Chief Inspector Macdonald of Scotland Yard. Little Thatch has been gutted in a blaze, and a body has been found. It seems that the deceased is Nicholas Vaughan, and that he died as a result of an accident, but Wilton isn’t satisfied. Macdonald duly takes himself down to Devon, and soon becomes convinced that there is more to the tragedy than meets the eye.
The likeable and diligent Macdonald appeared in all the books which Edith Caroline Rivett (1894–1958) published under the name E.C.R. Lorac. Macdonald made his debut in The Murder on the Burrows (1931) and took a final bow in the posthumously published Death of a Lady Killer (1959). The Lorac novels won many admirers, including the sometimes acerbic Dorothy L. Sayers. Writing in the Sunday Times in 1935, Sayers heaped praise upon The Organ Speaks: “Mr. Lorac’s story is entirely original, highly ingenious and remarkable for atmospheric writing and convincing development of character”.
The next year, the renowned crime critic of the Observer, “Torquemada”, was equally enthusiastic: “I praised the last three of Mr. Lorac’s books each for a different quality, for pleasantness of style, for ingenuity, and for sound characterisation. Now I find all these qualities present in A Pall for a Painter. So it is safe to bet that this author will soon find himself an accepted member of that very small band which writes first-rate detective stories that are also literature.” Sure enough, the following year Lorac was elected to membership of the elite Detection Club, together with the future Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis (who wrote crime fiction as Nicholas Blake), Newton Gayle (a pseudonym which concealed the combined identities of Muna Lee and Maurice Guinness), and Christopher Bush.
After the Second World War, with the Golden Age of Murder in detective fiction effectively over, several of the genre’s most distinguished practitioners, including Sayers and Anthony Berkeley, who had founded the Detection Club, ceased to write detective novels. Lorac, however, continued to write industriously. Because she produced so much, some of her books, and perhaps especially those which appeared under the pen-name Carol Carnac, were relatively routine. But she was never less than a capable craftswoman, and at her best she constructed compelling mysteries. She kept writing to the very end—at her death, a final manuscript was left incomplete. One other novel written towards the end of her life, Two-Way Murder, has never been published, despite the fact that it is a sound and characteristically readable piece of work. Today, her books are ripe for rediscovery, and it is a pleasure to reintroduce this under-estimated author to a new generation of readers.
Martin Edwards
www.martinedwardsbooks.com