a gallimaufry

Death and Mary Dazill, by Mary Fitt

How should I describe this short and compelling novel? It takes elements of the detective novel (although more The Moonstone than Agatha Christie), gothic fiction and Greek tragedy and blends them into a novel which feels like a ghost story by M.R. James (although there is nothing supernatural in it), but retold by Patricia Highsmith, and with a clever structure divided between around 1890 and around fifty years later. Now republished by Moonstone Press, it is astonishing that a novel of this quality has languished out of print for so long.

Dr Fitzbrown, Superintendent Mallett and Dr Jones are attending a funeral in Chode churchyard when they witness two old ladies drive up in an expensive car and walk to a tomb, where their chauffeur lays a wreath of hothouse flowers. Curious, they ask about them while taking tea with the local vicar. The vicar explains that they are the de Boulter sisters, Lindisfarne (Lindy) and Arran, the tomb is that of their father and brother, and that the sisters are responsible for the destruction of Mary Dazill, who occupies another grave on the far side of the churchyard. All three – Ralph and Leonard de Boulter, and Mary Dazill – died within year of each other. The vicar’s wife, Mrs Barratt, furnishes the story; her mother, Lucy Brown, was a close friend of Lindy’s and told her daughter the story.

In 1890 the de Boulters were living at Chetwynde Lodge, a grand house near Chode: Ralph had recently retired from service in Burma and withdrawn his teenaged daughters from boarding school to live with him. Frequent visitors were Leonard, his friend from Oxford, John, and Lucy Brown. Shocked at how poorly his daughters had been educated, Ralph engaged a companion-governess sort of person for them: Mary Dazill. Beautiful, self-possessed and passive, Mary’s very existence aroused great love and great fear in equal measures. Of course, it all ended very badly.

‘You don’t believe in the power of the dead, Doctor? You don’t believe that, whatever happens to their poor souls, their influence reaches out of the past – their loves, their hatreds, live on and touch the living? [...] Those two women you saw just now,’ she said, ‘Lindy and Arran de Boulter – they are living and walking monuments to the power of Mary Dazill.’

Ostensibly, most of the book consists of Mrs Barratt narrating the events of 1890ish to the pipe-smoking gentlemen in the dusty vicarage sitting-room; their reactions frame the story and provide its epilogue. In fact, Mary Fitt completely subverts this first by including the characters’ dialogue and feelings, which naturally Mrs Barratt via Lucy Brown would be unable to relate in any detail, and second by relaying scenes at which Lucy Brown was not even present and therefore could not have described to her daughter.

This is perhaps a borrowing from cinema and actually works really well. The framing device of a story told at second hand intensifies its creepiness and ambiguity, and the speculations of the listening men build in further uncertainty about how we should understand it. Is Mary Dazill (is it pronounced ‘dazzle’ or more devilishly ‘dee-el’?) a poor woman making the best of her chances, a threat to family cohesiveness (and wealth) – or something more malevolent? This double narrative creates a tension between the fictive ‘realness’ of the Victorian scenes, which we experience as if we are there, and their impossibility, because we are reminded that we could not have experienced them. As with many literary ghost stories which use a framing device, the novel’s pointing to the fact that it’s a story makes it easier for us to suspend our disbelief and accept it but at the same time doubt it.

I wrote about a later novel by Mary Fitt here, and there are similarities: an enigmatic dead woman, a sophisticated narrative structure, mysteries that are never completely resolved. Death and Mary Dazill is, I think, pacier and more succinct, stranger and more atmospheric. It is a classic and you should read it.

(Photograph of Mary Fitt, pseudonym of Kathleen Freeman, found here, where you can also read more about her)

Clues to Christabel, by Mary Fitt

I can’t remember now where I came across Clues to Christabel. Originally published in 1944 (and set in the 1930s), it and a handful of other novels by Mary Fitt have been recently re-issued by Moonstone Press, an independent publisher specialising in republishing vintage crime and detective fiction. (Fortunately, as second-hand copies of most of Fitt’s novels are pricey.) Here is what they have to say about her work:

Her intellectual background produced elegantly written crime fiction with a strong sense of the literary and the overtones of Greek tragedy – dealing with love, loss, pride, the abuse of power and fraught relationships. But it is her method of upending the traditional format of whodunits that was unusual (perhaps unique) among Golden Age mystery writers.  Fitt’s novels do not follow the traditional “crime-followed-by-resolution-through-deduction” pattern; although they start with a death, it might appear to be from natural causes or an accident or a suicide. Some are virtually devoid of any detection and have no detective to speak of — the mystery in Fitt’s books is not whodunit, but whether it was done, and if so, why it was done. How a character is formed by environment and connected chains of circumstances is the puzzle to be solved.

Mary Fitt was the pseudonym of Kathleen Freeman. Born in 1897 and daughter of a brewer’s traveller, despite her humble beginnings and her sex, Freeman taught herself Ancient Greek, studied Classics at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire where she was appointed a lecturer and later received her Doctor of Letters, wrote twenty-nine mystery novels, was elected to the Detection Club and co-habited with her partner, Liliane Clopet, for a good thirty years. So, an impressive woman and an unusual approach to crime fiction, a difficult combination to resist.

(Portrait of Kathleen Freeman found on Wikipedia)

Clues for Christabel certainly falls into that category described as a whether or why dunnit rather than a whodunnit. The central character, Christabel Strange, has died of undulant fever (nowadays more commonly called brucellosis) a year before the novel begins. Only thirty-two, she was a very successful novelist; so successful that she was able to buy her ancestral home out of mortgage and allow the rest of her family to live there. In her Will she leaves the house to the family with the proviso that her friend Marcia Wentworth is permitted the use of one wing. She also bequeaths her diaries to her family, but Marcia is to write her biography. Alas, the family loathes Marcia and refuses to let her see the diaries or interview them about Christabel.

Not one to give up easily, Marcia assembles a group of people who knew Christabel at the family pile. The group includes Dr George Cardew, a childhood friend of Christabel’s, and is split between the family, headed by the manipulative and possibly mad Granny Strange, and Christabel’s more ‘bohemian’ friends. Hostility bubbles away and ends of course in murder.

The name Christabel conjures up Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s narrative poem and while I wouldn’t say there is an overt connection between it and Clues to Christabel, it adds an atmospheric layer to the novel. The themes of a sort of vampirism or parasitism, and hatred returned for kindness, as well as something of Christabel’s character, do seem to be shared. Maybe there is also some repressed lesbianism?

If her depiction of her characters is pin-sharp, it’s Fitt’s structuring of her novel which distinguishes it from other crime novels of the time. Fitt shifts between omniscient, first-person and close third-person forms effortlessly, including entire sections narrated by one person and, near the end, Christabel’s stolen diary is reproduced. These shifts give us the sense of being presented with a range of ‘clues’ to the novel’s heart: the character of Christabel herself. What really happened to her, and why did she write a Will that frustrates everyone included within it? Eventually, the identity of the murderer is revealed but I don’t think it’s difficult to guess at all, because the real mystery is Christabel. You will have to draw your own conclusions from this clever but ultimately saddening novel.

(The other mystery is: what is a chippette box? The chemist shop issues Christabel’s pills in one. Even the OED can’t tell me what it is. Some sort of pulped wood? Cardboard?