Mystery in White

Mystery in White by J. Jefferson Farjeon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was originally published in 1937. It was republished in 2014 by—somewhat surprisingly—the British Library. It’s subtitled “A Christmas Crime Story”, and it does exactly what it says on the tin.
One Christmas Eve, a group of passengers disembark from a snow-bound train and chance upon a deserted country house, where—mysteriously—the fires are lit, the kettle is boiling, and tea has been laid out for them. But where is their host?
The characters are nicely delineated. There’s old Mr Maltby, member of the Royal Psychical Society; Lydia and David, two bright young things who happen to be brother and sister; the showgirl Jessie, with the power of psychometry (divining insights from objects simply by touching them); young Mr Thomson-without-a-p, a clerk who daydreams of saving damsels in distress from the wreckage of airplanes—go psychoanalyse that! There’s a pompous bore, who soon gets the wind knocked out of his sails, and a cockney ne’er-do-well, the least convincingly drawn of all the characters—surprisingly so, since Farjeon himself is descended from an impoverished Jewish family from Whitechapel.
There’s a murder or two, and it falls to the ultra-logical, perspicacious Mr Maltby to unravel the affair. Every time he opens his mouth, I hear and see the actor Alastair Simm at his most cadaverous and dyspeptic.



Some of the “witty”, “sparkling” banter feels decidedly shaky, and there’s some unnecessary and confusing business involving Maltby claiming to find a dead body in one of the rooms when he hasn’t—but what else do you expect from a book of this vintage? A good-natured if extremely lightweight novel from the brother of Eleanor Farjeon, the poet who gave us the words to “Morning Has Broken”.
Read for the Crime & Thrillers reading group that I attend at Canada Water Library, and also for my 2015 Goodreads reading challenge.
But that’s just my own humble opinion…what do you think? Do let me know!

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