A mystery wrapped in an enigma: "JANE BOYD", Murder in the King's Road (1953)

Yes, I know I'm misquoting Churchill, but the misquote fits the present book quite nicely.

First of all, it is indeed a mystery novel, as you might reasonably guess from its title and its rather garish cover. I happened to stumble across it when I was idly browsing the catalogue of the Boston Athenaeum, no less, and I added Boyd to my database as an author to research. Since I am actually engaged at present in some research with a view to finally posting a new update to my British Women Writers list, it wasn't long before I looked into her a bit more. I found nothing except the fact that the name was a pseudonym.

Which leads to the enigma surrounding the mystery. When I forwarded my list of new authors to the great and powerful John Herrington, whose research skills extend far beyond my own and who is so often a life saver in these situations, he discovered that the book's publisher had apparently said that "Jane Boyd" was a pseudonym concealing "the identity of a crime writer of distinction".

Now, I was not born yesterday, so I realize that publisher lingo might be a bit more hyperbolic than reality would reflect. It should go without saying that I, when wearing my publisher cap, have never engaged in such hyperbole (!!), but some less scrupulous publishers might, so "distinction" could be a relative term here. Even allowing for that, however, I was intrigued enough to want to sample the prose, and an enthusiastic short review I came across sealed the deal. An Abe Books order followed, and—the book arriving in a record-breaking two days from placing of the order (from Texas to California, no less)—I took it as a sign from the literary universe and immediately dived in, bypassing numerous other books awaiting my attention.

It turned out to be a good solid little mystery—not an all time favorite, but quite enjoyable. It opens with Miss Arbutus, the ubiquitous middle-aged spinster, walking her dog, Caramel, early one summer morning, and noticing, as she window shops at a familiar antique shop, a body sprawled on a sofa inside. The body turns out to be that of bestselling novelist Vernon Bran, and the mystery somehow involves a batch of old furniture which the antique shop's owner has just acquired from an estate sale. The suspects include Paul Dedham, said shop owner, who purports never to have seen the victim before, Julie Bran, wife of the victim and a well-known actress herself, who is none too broken up over his death, Mr Blaggart, Bran's publisher, who has been eagerly awaiting a long-promised manuscript from Bran, and Miss Arbutus's godson Michael, who would seem to have no connection to Bran but who is strikingly fixated on the crime. Plus there's Michael's fiancée Claire, Claire's new housekeeper Arlene, and a few others, who behave more or less oddly about it all.

It's an effectively disparate and seemingly unconnected group of characters, whose gradually-revealed interconnections and motivations are satisfyingly intricate (but not impenetrable, so I'm pretty sure it's not a lost Gladys Mitchell!). The "who" of the whodunnit was a bit disappointing for me, but on the other hand I certainly didn't anticipate this person's guilt, and the various plot twists and revelations had me reading quite compulsively.

The writing is solid and enjoyable, but certainly not lavishly literary or sophisticated, so it's not a lost Sayers or Tey, and it lacks the brilliant, focused simplicity of a Christie, the slightly noir edge of an Allingham, and the perkiness of a Heyer. (And although Miss Arbutus has some very clear ideas about proper masculine behavior, she's not nearly homophobic enough to have been created by Christianna Brand!)

There are certainly some standout moments here and there. For example, I loved the passage in which Miss Arbutus is just realizing that what she's looking at is a corpse instead of a window display:

Vaguely at the back of her mind the figure reminded her of something, not of a particular person but of some occasion when she had seen figures which looked similar in their stiff abandon. Then it came back to her; of course, it had been during the raids, once she had come upon a house which had just been bombed, the inhabitants had been killed and were lying about in the rising smoke and dust, they had looked just like stuffed dolls, just like this man.

And there's a touch of humor in her subsequent anxiety about dealing with the police:

Miss Arbutus, for the second time, repeated the story of her morning walk and of her sinister discovery. By now it sounded improbable, even to her. If they asked her maid if she were in the habit of parading the streets at five-thirty a.m. because she couldn't sleep and Mary said, 'Yes, Madam often does that,' it would sound strange. If she replied, 'Madam has never done such a thing before,' it would seem stranger still.

But the greatest strength of the novel are Boyd's two detectives, Inspector Pobham and Detective Richards, an intriguing twist on the traditional Holmes and Watson:

Richards' chief, Geoffrey Pobham, was an improbable person to find in the precincts of Scotland Yard. Those who knew him felt that an Oxford college would have provided a more suitable background to his jovial, cynical wit and his academic qualifications. Richards had been appalled when he first met him. He had felt that such an apparent lack of zeal and such a sympathy with the criminal classes could only provide a demoralising element in the Force, but by now he had learned better. To Pobham, on the other hand, Richards with his sense of duty, lack of humour and strict sense of justice was a constant delight. When he had taken up his work at Scotland Yard he had been rather disappointed to find that his colleagues were far from the stereotyped detectives of fiction, in Richards alone he seemed to see the model of an inspector. Pobham always claimed that it was purely on these grounds that he had chosen Richards as his assistant, but whether this were true or not he had by now developed an irritable paternal affection for him.

It's really rather a shame that this was the only appearance of Pobham and Richards—had Boyd written 20 or 30 books about them, they might now form the basis of a highly entertaining television series.

At any rate, it's entirely appropriate that the novel's plot revolves around questions about whether the murdered Bran really wrote the novels he published, since the book's own author is also shrouded in mystery.

I was convinced, in my naïve way, that my handy database of authors would provide a handful of tantalizing possibilities for the true identity of Jane Boyd. Assuming that to have been called a "crime writer of distinction" by even the most unscrupulous publisher, she (I do think it's a woman, though of course we don't know for sure) must have published at least a few novels before 1953, I sorted the approximately 45,000 titles in my database by year of publication, and then browsed all of 1950-1952 for authors of multiple mysteries who were active in those years.

The result, as I should probably have predicted, was a bit more than a handful. Apart from the big names mentioned above, who were surely unlikely as possibilities anyway (under the assumption that a pseudonymous publication by any well-documented and closely-researched author—with savvy heirs interested in maintaining a steady income—could not have remained hidden for so long), I came up with no fewer than 30 possibilities. Ahem. Some are more likely than others, and many are authors I haven't read, so I can't judge just how unlikely those are, but the ones I have read I couldn't quite eliminate from contention (Josephine Bell? hmmmm). Here, for your consideration, is what I came up with (most of these are on my Mystery List, if you want to see what I know about them):

Marjorie Alan

Margaret Archer

Pamela Barrington

Josephine Bell

Margot Bennett

Emery Bonnett (pseudonym of Felicity Winifred Carter and husband)

Caryl Brahms (known for humorous mysteries, so probably not a match)

Pamela Branch (ditto)

Zenith Jones Brown (American, but she had written many British mysteries as David Frome)

Joanna Cannan

Joan Cockin

Alexandra Dick

Doris Disney

Mary Durham

Margaret Erskine

Katharine Farrer

Elizabeth Ferrars

Joan Fleming

Kathleen Freeman (better known as Mary Fitt)

Mary Violet Heberden

Anne Hocking

Ianthe Jerrold

Lucy Beatrice Malleson (better known as Anthony Gilbert)

Jean Marsh

Edith Pargeter (had already written mysteries as John Redfern and Jolyon Carr, though she hadn't yet created her most famous incarnation, Ellis Peters—this would have been her only feminine pseudonym, but who knows?)

Sheila Pim (Boyd isn't funny enough to have been Pim)

Mona Radford (better known as M. A. Radford)

Shelley Smith (more a thriller writer than a whodunnit author?)

Nancy Spain (known for wordplay and camp, so probably not a match)

Patricia Wentworth

What do you think? Any "Eureka!" moments? Alas, not for me, though I will say that there were moments as I was reading when I thought the prose seemed familiar somehow. Probably just my imagination? Or not?

Well, you can test your own abilities below, as I'll post a two-page sample from very early in the novel (so as not to spoil anything). If anyone has a revelation and cries out, "That could only be Mary Violet Heberden!", do let me know…