"Penhallow", Georgette Heyer
13 May 2019 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI've read all Heyer's historical novels, even "Powder and Patch" and "The Great Roxhythe", but I've only read a few of the contemporary detective stories with which for years she alternated them. I picked up this one expecting a Golden Age cardboard-type mystery in which the criminal is unmasked with a flourish in the last chapter by an improbable coincidence; I don't know if the rest of her detective novels are like that (from what I can gather from the Internet, 'Penhallow' appears to be considered an outlier by any standards), but this one certainly isn't.
It's more like a cross between Daphne du Maurier and Ruth Rendell, a book in which the identity and motives of the murderer are no mystery at all and the author spends all her time depicting the slow build-up of an intolerable situation until someone inevitably cracks, and then exploring the consequences. It breaks the unspoken rules of Golden Age detective fiction in that (as in "Rebecca") the murderer gets away with it -- after a fashion, like Maxim. I was expecting the real culprit's identity to be betrayed at the end by some ironic twist, as in C.S.Forester's "Payment Deferred", but in fact the irony is that the revelation anticipated by the characters doesn't happen.
All the characters are weak and/or unlikable, and yet the author allows us to identify momentarily with all of them (save perhaps the insufferable Aubrey, who simply sits around on the sidelines sniping to demonstrate his own superiority -- I don't think we ever get a view into his real personality). The murder victim himself is eminently detestable, a tyrannous brute who is both dying and slipping into malicious insanity, and it's hard to see his end as anything other than a blessing and a blessed release... save that, as Heyer demonstrates, doing evil that good may come is apt to backfire.
Of the siblings, I immediately identified with the intelligent but apathetic Eugène, whose weapon of choice is the cutting remark rather than his brothers' fisticuffs, and who prefers to think himself ill than face up to the fray of a serious literary career; his saving grace is the genuine understanding and attachment between him and his wife that makes it credible she would have sacrificed everything for his benefit. However, his role as cynical provocateur is pretty much taken over by the camp posturings of Aubrey, who arrives about halfway through -- I always had a sneaking appreciation of Francis Cheviot in "The Reluctant Widow", who adopts similarly affected airs as cover for a ruthless intellect and a formidable competence that Our Heroes are ultimately obliged to acknowledge (see also Byerly Vorrutyer in "A Civil Campaign", who gets a similar final-chapter reveal). But Aubrey doesn't appear to have any depths beyond a desire to infuriate his siblings with his poses and witticisms, and I couldn't find any redeeming features in him.
With the others one finds oneself sympathising by turns, to the degree that by the end of the book you are thoroughly hoping that the crime will remain unsolved and that no-one will have to answer for Penhallow's death. Well, they don't, but only because another misunderstanding conveniently supplies a culprit...
It's more like a cross between Daphne du Maurier and Ruth Rendell, a book in which the identity and motives of the murderer are no mystery at all and the author spends all her time depicting the slow build-up of an intolerable situation until someone inevitably cracks, and then exploring the consequences. It breaks the unspoken rules of Golden Age detective fiction in that (as in "Rebecca") the murderer gets away with it -- after a fashion, like Maxim. I was expecting the real culprit's identity to be betrayed at the end by some ironic twist, as in C.S.Forester's "Payment Deferred", but in fact the irony is that the revelation anticipated by the characters doesn't happen.
All the characters are weak and/or unlikable, and yet the author allows us to identify momentarily with all of them (save perhaps the insufferable Aubrey, who simply sits around on the sidelines sniping to demonstrate his own superiority -- I don't think we ever get a view into his real personality). The murder victim himself is eminently detestable, a tyrannous brute who is both dying and slipping into malicious insanity, and it's hard to see his end as anything other than a blessing and a blessed release... save that, as Heyer demonstrates, doing evil that good may come is apt to backfire.
Of the siblings, I immediately identified with the intelligent but apathetic Eugène, whose weapon of choice is the cutting remark rather than his brothers' fisticuffs, and who prefers to think himself ill than face up to the fray of a serious literary career; his saving grace is the genuine understanding and attachment between him and his wife that makes it credible she would have sacrificed everything for his benefit. However, his role as cynical provocateur is pretty much taken over by the camp posturings of Aubrey, who arrives about halfway through -- I always had a sneaking appreciation of Francis Cheviot in "The Reluctant Widow", who adopts similarly affected airs as cover for a ruthless intellect and a formidable competence that Our Heroes are ultimately obliged to acknowledge (see also Byerly Vorrutyer in "A Civil Campaign", who gets a similar final-chapter reveal). But Aubrey doesn't appear to have any depths beyond a desire to infuriate his siblings with his poses and witticisms, and I couldn't find any redeeming features in him.
With the others one finds oneself sympathising by turns, to the degree that by the end of the book you are thoroughly hoping that the crime will remain unsolved and that no-one will have to answer for Penhallow's death. Well, they don't, but only because another misunderstanding conveniently supplies a culprit...
