She picks up a lot of information through conversation and she receives a number of confidences. The main attraction for me in this novel is the central amateur sleuth, Jeanie Halliday, who I found to be a young Miss Marple in training. The central crime also has a clever motivation behind it. Like all good country house mysteries the country house is snow bound and tensions between the characters run high. The cast of characters are psychologically intriguing even if they aren’t very likeable. Hare’s novel is an excellent example of the country house novel as a social/cultural critique and the changing times are reflected well. This is definitely an enjoyable instance of the comic country house mystery, where some of our favourite sleuths and detective fiction tropes are parodied well.Ģ. Case for Three Detectives (1936) by Leo Bruce.Here are a few of my favourite country house mysteries, in no particular order: Whether it involves Christmas parties, sinister building histories and the odd secret passage or two, the country house novel when done well is always a treat. Over the last century there have been many changes to how country houses are used, which is subtly depicted in Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders(2016), where the country home is no longer an inherited possession and an integral part of the local village, but becomes the retreat of the nouveau riche. Equally in June Wright’s So Bad a Death(1949) and Eilís Dillon’s Sent to His Account(1954), the country house novel can become a vehicle for social, cultural, class and genre critique. I disagree with this as not only is Murder Included an example of a mystery novel showing landed gentry taking in paying guests to pay the bills, but in my list of favourite country house mystery novels below, there is more than one example of a country home in decline. Catherine Aird in The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing (1999) says that the ‘actual decline of the country house is seldom documented in detective fiction,’ (Aird, 1999: 94-95 (94)). Something else I have noticed in my reading this year is that the country house and its inhabitants can be used by writers to symbolise the state of the nation or to reflect social changes and issues such as in Joanna Cannan’s Murder Included(1950). Sometimes such awkward situations happen unintentionally, but more frequently they are planned by diabolically minded hosts such as in Death and the Dancing Footman (1942) or by more well intentioned country house owners such as in The Mystery at Stowe(1928). Furthermore, this small group of characters commonly don’t get on with each other, yet are forced to socialise with one another – a narrative facet which can often be funny and interesting from a psychological point of view. From their isolated locales, often caused by poor weather, to the fact that there is usually a small group of characters focused on, who frequently pretend to be one thing and are invariably something or someone else altogether.

There is definitely something about the country house milieu and atmosphere which appeals to me in crime fiction.

Murder mystery house