Penguin no. 1304: The Long Divorce by Edmund Crispin

Constable Burns took crime seriously. He had been accepted into the Police Force soon after his demobilization in 1946, and most of his spare time since then had been spent poring over works of criminology with a view to fitting himself for the day when his longed-for transfer to the Criminal Investigation Department should be achieved. Hans Gross he had read, and Taylor on medical jurisprudence (though his ignorance of anatomy and of general medicine had made that particular book heavy and in the upshot not wholly satisfactory going),....Constable Burns took (I repeat) crime seriously; and it was therefore a little unkind of the gods to decree that his contribution to the solution of the Rubi affair should result from anything so banal as plain observation and ordinary, unscientific common sense.

There was an uneasiness expressed in Corduroy about the gradual encroachment of middle class values into the rural villages of England, and an overt hostility to it in Coming Up for Air. I think in both those cases it was the opening of a 'tea shoppe' which gave the first warning of the coming invasion, and the concern was with what it seemed to represent, a weighting of the aesthetic over the functional, and far too much concern with how things looked.

As Mr Datchery walks through Cotten Abbas after arriving there late one Friday afternoon, he infers that a similar process has been under way in this village, although as this book was written after the war, the process is far more advanced. He senses it in a conformity which can only imply the imposition of a shared set of values, and it can be seen in the style of all the new buildings, and in the inn signs, and in recent changes to the church. He feels confidant in his assumption that he is walking through a place which is no longer a working village; it has become instead the picturesque and protected home of the cultured and the wealthy, of people who commute to London when their artistic occupations require it.

But these upper middle-class inhabitants have not been completely successful in imposing their tastes upon their co-inhabitants. No amount of pressure could dissuade Harry Rolt from building a saw-mill on his land by the village, even though it spoilt their view of the stream. Life in this village hasn't been completely harmonious as a result, but the impasse has been maintained on both sides. Rolt is a stubborn man from up North, with no time for such notions as unspoilt England, and he has been content to remain an outsider in the village in which he lives.

He is just one of the interesting characters with whom Crispin fills his village of Cotten Abbas. There is also the foreign schoolmaster Peter Rubi who imports all his food from Europe, and applies his enthusiasm for psychoanalytic theory in looking upon his fellow villagers as subjects for scientific study; and the young Dr Downing  who had hoped for more excitement and success from life, but finds her practice declining because an innate distrust of female practitioners is one that even these progressive folk find difficult to overcome;  and there is the ambitious Constable Burns, applying his working hours to the menial tasks of rural policing, and his leisure hours to the study of fingerprints and forensics.

As with any small community there is interest in gossip, but Datchery notes that some mechanism of communal self-protection operates to ensure anything really damaging is kept from those it would most alarm. But someone has taken it upon themselves to subvert this process, and anonymous letters have been arriving through the mail slots of unsuspecting villagers, informing them of things they would probably prefer not to know. Poor Mrs Mogridge has learnt of her husband's fondness for the staff, and Mr Rolt knows now that his daughter Penelope has been going about with Peter Rubi. Other letters have simply been obscene, revealing more about the writer's obsessions than any habits of the villagers. But the person writing the letters has been very careful, and after two weeks the police still have no idea who has been sending them .

And then Mr Datchery arrives for his weekend stay, starts asking questions, and things seem to intensify: one villager commits suicide on the Friday, and another is found murdered on the Sunday.

This is a very different book to the the delightfully frivolous The Moving Toyshop. There are fewer literary references, no self-referencing, and although the story still includes a chase, it is a far less manic one. The humour here is concentrated primarily on the character sketches and in Datchery's observations on the idiosyncracies of village life. And there is a greater focus on the plot, with an interesting resolution.

I loved The Moving Toyshop, so perhaps I didn't enjoy this as much, but I recognise it as the better book. In many ways, though, it is just as absurd: Datchery is there for a single weekend and determines not only the identities of the poison-pen letter writer and murderer, he inadvertently solves every other problem facing the village residents. With the exception of the two villagers no longer alive, everyone in the village is far better off by the end of this weekend.

By the same author:
Penguin no. 988: The Case of the Gilded Fly
Penguin no. 1315: The Moving Toyshop