I was reading one of Calmgrove’s reliably excellent posts, this one on Walpurgisnacht, when FictionFan quoted in the comments the opening line of Broomsticks over Flaxborough, by Colin Watson:
Naked as on the day she was born, save for a double-looped string of amber beads and a pair of harlequin-framed spectacles, Mrs Flora Pentatuke, of 33 Partney Avenue, Flaxborough, leaped nimbly over the embers of the fire.
How could I resist? Moreover, a novel that combined witchcraft with detection? It is still (expensively) in print with Faber Finds, but second-hand copies are available and naturally I paid extra for one with a pretty cover because I am a Fool.
Shortly after Mrs Flora Pentatuke skips over the fire on Walpurgisnacht, at ‘the quarterly “Revel” of the Flaxborough, Chalmsbury and Brocklestone Folklore Society’, the car of one of its members is found abandoned in a wood. Where is Edna Hillyard? And then the parish church is desecrated. While the manufacturers of Lucillite washing-powder direct a marketing campaign at Flaxborough, the police wrestle with the possibility that the town has been gripped by Satanism. Is this merely an outlet for the bored occupants of suburbia? Or is something more sinister going on (perhaps even a covert Russian plan to subvert the Christian world)? Soon a corpse has turned up, dead animals are being nailed to people’s doors and Miss Lucilla Teatime of the Edith Cavell Psychical Research Foundation has been called in...
‘You cannot put handcuffs on Satan, my friend.’
Watson has a great comic touch (yes yes, a tad sexist but this is 1972) and a sharp eye for the telling detail, while the mystery of Edna Hillyard’s disappearance is enjoyable too. As well as Miss Teatime and Mrs Pentatuke, we meet Inspector Purbright, so laid back he is practically horizontal; his chief constable, Chubb, who cannot believe that members of the Conservative Club could be anything other than pillars of virtue; bloodthirsty Sister Gooding, baker of dread biscuits and owner of the vicious black dog ‘Meffie’; pedantic Warlock Parkin; Mrs Gloss OBE, chatelaine of Aleister Lodge; and Mrs Framlington, the whimsical vegetarian Coven chairman who worries about the effects of black magic on the carpet.
The world Watson creates is an ersatz world, a fallen world, stuffed with cheap imitations and petty strifes. People hide their televisions in ‘Jacobean’ sideboards. They eat KreemiKrunch Kookies, ‘a country-style combination of dehydrated milk solids, soya rusk, sodium monostearate and saccharin’, and wear ‘dinky nylon nightie[s]’. The advertising campaign is of course fake and manipulative. The coven is a painful modern approximation of Satanism, compelled to make do with black polythene, novelty mugs and home-made ‘pumpkin champagne laced with rum’ for their orgies. Good manners disguise hostility:
Pook brought out this piece of reasoning with the air of having forced some wily miscreant into a corner.
Mrs Gloss made no comment. She poured more coffee for Miss Parkin, refilled her own cup, and moved the remaining biscuits to the side of the table farthest from Detective-Constable Pook.
The novel seems redolent to me of those 1970s sitcoms, presided over by Penelope Keith. I see that there is a whole series of Flaxborough Chronicles, concerning the exploits of Inspector Purbright, and now I am wholeheartedly looking forward to reading them all.
(The photograph of Colin Watson is from the Curtis Brown website.)