Especially interesting on social conditions in the 1930s. Not a gripping thriller as such but definitely helps to round out our view of life in that era and remind us that it was not all cosy.

For several years the British Library have been publishing their Crime Classics series, containing titles from the 'golden age' of detective fiction and beyond. Some of them are quite well-known, others more obscure.

This particular novel, Family Matters, originally published in 1933, is rather unconventional in comparison to some of the others, in that it's an inverted mystery - we know from the start who will die, and which other characters would like him dead, but what we only find out at the end is which suspect was actually guilty. What this structure loses in its intrigue it by far makes up in its characterisation (a common criticism levelled at 'whodunnits', as revealing too much is a giveaway of the solution). The characters, it has to be said, are pretty unpleasant, and I felt I cared little for any of them. The first quarter of the novel is a bit of a slog, and had this been my first Crime Classic I might have abandoned the book, but I've read enough of the series to trust in the titles selected, and so I persisted. I'm glad I did. Whilst this isn't going to convert anyone to an avid follower of the series, it's different enough to hold a charm. Not recommended to the casual crime fan - especially one more used to the fast pace of a contemporary crime novel - but for those of us who don't mind a rather more ponderous and languid read, it's an entertaining enough way to pass the time.

"Robert Arthur Kewdingham is an eccentric failure of a man. In middle age he retreats into a private world, hunting for Roman artifacts and devoting himself to bizarre mystical beliefs. Robert’s wife, Bertha, feels that there are few things more dreadful than a husband who will persist in making a fool of himself in public. Their marriage consists of horrible quarrels, futile arguments, incessant bickering. Scarcely any friends will visit the Kewdinghams in their peaceful hometown Shufflecester."

More olde thyme reissues, this time with a very unfortunate name for anyone who grew up in the nineties and might want to read it...

From http://www.bookbarmy.com

Is it possible to have a crush on a publisher?

My heart beats faster, my fingers fondle their book covers, and my wallet giddily opens its arms -- all for The British Library Crime Series by Poisoned Pen Press.

Just look at these beauties, I mean really, what mystery reader could resist?
I first became aware of this series with my first purchase of THIS long lost favorite mystery. Since then I have cultivated a insatiable craving finely-tuned taste for this Poisoned Pen Press imprint.

In 1997, husband and wife founders, Robert Rosenwald and Barbara Peters, who are also the owners of the legendary Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona, saw an opportunity to re-publish the wonderful British mysteries novels of the 1930's and 1940's. They tapped into every bibliophile's secret desire --out of print titles, long lost authors, and beautiful covers to lovingly add to a bookcase:

“We knew that mystery readers wanted complete collections, so we thought we could make a business out of that.”
I've read several of these and, while some are better than others, all are well-plotted mysteries graced with some classic crime writing and completely interesting settings - in short they are pure fun escape reading.

There are locked room mysteries (Miraculous Mysteries), murders in Europe (Continental Crimes), small village settings (Death of a Busybody), and dead bodies in crumbling manors (Seven Dead).
In short, there's a British mystery for you in The British Library Crime Series. You got to love any publisher/bookseller who states this as their mission statement:

We are a community Bound By Mystery.

and who gathers praise such as this:

Hurrah to British Library Crime Classics for rediscovering some of the forgotten gems of the Golden Age of British crime writing.(Globe and Mail)

Might I suggest you support this fine enterprise by buying the books direct from their website ~ just click this logo.

This is a comedy of manners in Depression-era England, dressed up as a murder mystery. It is skillfully done, but it is satirizing things unfamiliar to most modern readers, and it relies heavily on social constraints nearly incomprehensible today. It's definitely part of the British Golden Age detective stories, but most of those skip over the years between the Jazz Age and WWII. So while it pokes clever fun at other authors, they are not the authors or works familiar today.

By design it is an unsatisfactory--even subversive--murder mystery. It's too slow and meandering to be thrilling. The point is a large array of stylized characters from other books who appear on the pages, demonstrate their eccentricities in everyday events or mull over story events, then disappear from the author's attention. Every time the plot gets a little momentum, it stalls for a while, then drifts off in another direction.

I recommend it only as a curiosity for readers familiar with early 1930s British mysteries. With a lighter touch it could have been deliciously funny, with more of a point it could have been incisive satire. Instead it's well written, but I suspect the author had more fun writing it than the reader will reading it.

Another hit for the British Library Classics, but quite different from many of them! The highly entertaining parade of quite awful characters and behaviour is gleefully and darkly humorous. The storyline is fast paced and thoroughly enjoyable.

It's as if Joe Orton wrote a murder mystery.
This is a very different kind of mystery-- very modern in tone despite being written many decades ago.
The structure is untraditional, the humor is very black. There's no likeable characters, but it's very entertaining.
It's not exactly a whodunit--the murder victim doesn't meet his demise until 2/3 of the way through--but you will find the plot compelling.

Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve read quite a few titles from British Library Crime Classics, published by Poisoned Pen Press. The delightful Family Matters from author Anthony Rolls (real name C. E Vulliamy 1886-1971) is one of the strongest titles in the series. Yes there’s a murder, but the structure and content of this highly entertaining tale is quite different from the usual. The introduction from Martin Edwards gives an overview of the career of Anthony Rolls, and mentions that he wrote his crime novels during two very specific times of his life. Sadly all of his other work (apart from Scarweather) is oop and used copies are either impossible to find or pricey.

Family Matters is a domestic crime novel and concerns the troubled household of the Kewdinghams who live at Number 6 Wellington Avenue in the town of Shufflecester. Robert Arthur Kewdingham, a man from a solid middle class background, married Bertha, the daughter of a Canadian Wesleyan minster and a French governess. The Kewdinghams, with a couple of exceptions, are not happy about the match (especially the French part), and don’t consider Bertha good enough. Robert and Bertha have one child, and also living at Number 6 is Robert’s crotchety elderly father who looks at his daughter-in-law with dislike and writes her nasty notes with very pointed quotations.

Following the economic collapse, Robert, an engineer, lost his job. The Kewdinghams have modest independent means, but there’s never enough money. Robert, now unemployed, has turned to his many hobbies: The Great Kewdingham Collection, cabinets and “precarious piles of cardboard boxes” litter the house.

Inside these receptacles there was an astounding medley of junk: bits of coral, broken pots, beetles and butterflies impaled on pieces of cork or stuck on cards, odd fossils, bones, brasses, dried flowers, birds’ eggs, little figures in soapstone and ivory, ushabtis from the tombs of Egypt, fragments of uncertain things, weird scraps of metal, badges, buttons, mouldy coins and innumerable varieties of suchlike trash.

These days we’d call Robert a hoarder, but poor Bertha must tolerate other ‘eccentricities;’ her husband’s political activities (he thinks Shufflecester is “full of Bolsheviks“), he’s a hypochondriac who medicates himself with bizarre potions, and he has a “vast library of occult books and magazines, which he was constantly reading.” Add this to his belief that he lived an earlier life as “the High Priest of Atlantis, Keeper of Wisdom.”

He was now in middle age, without a profession, impecunious, full of absurd notions, a wretched hypochondriac, irritable, silly and resourceless.

Life at Number 6 is fraught with “incessant bickering,” and several outsiders, including the dapper little Doctor Bagge, and relative John Harrigall, feel bitterly sorry for the attractive Bertha who is trapped in an insufferable marriage to a selfish, egomaniac who has long passed the label of eccentric to mental case.

Friends of Robert, Mr and Mrs Chaddlewick also visit, and Mrs Chaddlewick with her cooing flattery and seemingly “amiable vacancy,” both encourages Robert’s foolishness and fosters domestic strife. It’s testament to Bertha’s tenacity and arguably her inflexibility that she refuses to ‘manage’ Robert in the same way. With criticism from Robert’s relatives and vicious notes from her father-in-law, it’s not surprising that Bertha should seek solace from the handsome John Harrigall. As Robert’s tirades escalate and become more violent, Bertha begins to consider murdering her husband.

Family Matters is an unusual crime novel for its structure and its conclusion, but it’s also separated from the herd by its attitude towards women. The court at Shufflecester, for example, is “bleak and hideous,” and we are told that “it is only possible to find this degree of squalor, of neglect and of ugliness, in courts of law–places where the sane influence of women has not yet penetrated.” There’s also mention of sex with a hint dropped of “three hours in a disused gravel-pit.” Anthony Rolls seems to understand the lonely, treacherous path to murder trod by the otherwise respectable member of society:

The inception of the idea of murder is not immediately recognised. Such an idea enters the mind in disguise-a new arrival in a sinister mask, not willingly entertained and yet by no means to be expelled. Or, in more scientific terms, it is introduced by a sort of auto-hypnosis, the mere repetition of the thoughts or words not immediately connected with personal action. Between the highly civilised individual and the act of murder there are so many barriers, so nay conventions and teachings-or so many illusions.

In the introduction, Martin Edwards argues that Rolls had good ideas but sometimes couldn’t sustain plots. That weakness is not evident here. With its caustic look at society, marriage and norms Family Matters is an impudent, lively novel, a delight to read.

Someone .. please bring The Vicar’s Experiments back into print.

review copy.

An outstanding gem from Anthony Rolls - not least because Mr. Rolls gives us Golden Age female characters that are written with depth and wit and an apparent belief that women have inner lives untouched or unfocused on men - that reads much more as a family drama (the terrible and various branches of the Kewdingham family) played out in several beautifully crafted parlor scenes. Death inevitably creeps in, but slowly and sparingly; no one is stumbling upon the Colonel stabbed in the library and his nephew floating in the pool. This all sounds very bleak, and it is in a cold tea and old cooking smells kind of way, but it is also leavened with the blackest of humor in the form of a narrator that winks through the pages. A must read.

A humorous and exceedingly strange mystery. You could almost say that it was a comedy of manners with criminal interruptions.

An eccentric out-of-work engineer is married to a younger woman. They live in a town where many of his relatives reside. The marriage has become unhappy and several people would be glad enough of the engineer's death.

Untypical for mysteries, almost 3/4's of the book is taken up with life before the death. It's only after that is being examined that the mysteries pop up and the novel becomes more conventional.

Full of great descriptive writing and memorable characters, this book is a fine addition to the British Classic Mystery series.

This book republished from 1933 was an intriguing read, a real black comedy if you think several people trying to poison a most obnoxious man is funny. In this case it is in a very dark way. Robert Kewingham is a waster. Despite being an engineer he has become unemployed and sits around the house fiddling with his collection of curiosities and pretending to be reborn from Atlantis. His half-french wife Bertha is continually incensed with his behaviour. She seeks solace in the company of the Doctor who is treating Robert for his various ailments until both have the same idea about how life could be improved without him.
With a cast of characters to accompany the main ones this provokes and entertains in equal measure as we consider this almost 'Kind Hearts and Coronets' plot. Worth a read to put Agatha Christie in historical context and enjoy the devious author's mind.

Set in 1933, in a quiet town in England, this domestic crime is one where you felt that the victim should have been got rid of a long time ago. The fact that he lasted this long is itself surprising.

The gentleman in question was Mr. Kewdingham, in his forties who has been out of work for quite some time. This did not detract from his sense of pompousness and attitude and was a source of frustration for his wife who was the younger and quite lovely Bertha. Mr. Kewdingham thought himself an authority on medicines and herbals and dabbled in self medication all the time. It was this that brought the idea of poisons into the mind of Bertha who sought to murder her husband in a slow and timely manner so that no suspicion would fall on her.

Unknown to her their family doctor wanting to trial a new thought on medicine sought to introduce a new medicine to Mr. Kewdingham not realising that the effects of this medicine, contradicted those being given by Mrs. K. Quite farcical because the doctor kept upping the meds and so did Bertha to no effect till the whole thing blew up and Mr K. finally died!

The ups and downs of the whole saga form the story in this book, detailing the everyday life in a small town just seventy miles from London. The details of the domestic front, the neighbours, and the extended family all add interest to this story. The investigation was detailed and meticulous and the justice meted out was surprising!

Goodreads and Amazon reviews up on 5/5/2017. Review on my blog end July 2017.

Do you enjoy stories of people stepping, inching, toward murder? This is one of those, and I don’t particularly care for that style; so I’m afraid my review won’t be as favorable as it might be if I did. It is intriguing, and the style is excellent. The characters are perfectly horrible, and the setting is drear enough. If you’re looking for a suspenseful read, here is the book for you. Even disliking every character and the style, I found it very hard to put down.
There was one thing about this story. (This is a serious spoiler. It will give away the ending.)
(SPOILER) Who did it!?! Couldn’t he think of a solution? After all that fine weaving of a web, he just leaves us hanging. Was it suicide or murder? He gave us such a marvelously detailed background, crime, inquest, and then ends with one – single – solitary paragraph on the trial, and even then it has no satisfying solution. If I had wanted a mystery with no solution, I would have read about real cold-cases. That accounts for the low rating. I like my mysteries to have nice, neat ending, and I hate loose ends. This has to be one of the most unsatisfying endings I have ever read.
Other than wicked people, flirtations between people who had no business flirting, and a murder, it was relatively clean. I could have done without the mild swearing though.
I received this book as a free ARC from NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press. No review was required, but it was my pleasure to write it.

This reissue of "Family Matters" from the early 1930’s is a diverting character driven mystery set in a village in England. Its an entertaining read, and challenges the reader to figure out whodunit in the face of a wealth of evidence.

Family Matters is a delicious black comedy. It is a pleasure to see it back in print. Despite being originally released in 1933, the novel is in no way out of date.

Robert Arthur Kewdingham is a horrible man. He is a lazy, rude, self-absorbed, pompous, and quarrelsome hypochondriac. He is such a fool that you don’t know whether to hate him or laugh at him. You do however feel for his wife Bertha who is made to suffer on a daily basis. It is no surprise when she begins to contemplate murder...but she isn’t the only one. No less than three people have it in for Robert, including his cousin John who has feelings for Bertha and his doctor. You would think then that his death is a given...maybe it is but it is far from straightforward.

Family Matters is ingeniously plotted and wittily written. The science included may be a sham but it is convincingly portrayed. The characters are quite unique and Anthony Rolls knows just how to add a believably dark twist. It isn’t often that you cheer on the murderers, but this novel will have you on their side. In all it is an excellent comedic mystery with just the right ending.

5 / 5

I received a copy of Family Matters from the publisher and Netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review.

--Crittermom

In his introduction to Anthony Rolls’ Family Matters, Martin Edwards likens it to Kind Hearts and Coronets, the wonderful Alec Guinness film where various members of the noble D’Ascoyne family are murdered by an heir very far down the line of succession. Each murder becomes more ridiculous than the last in the dark comedy.

And Family Matters is a dark comedy. The victim is a terrible person. Robert Kewdingham is a bully and a collector of “trash” which he insists are valuable pieces “possibly Roman.” He has boxes of beetles and butterflies which topple all over the drawing room. He is a practitioner of mysticism and has journeyed to Atlantis in his dreams where he is a very important high priest. Plus he has a medicine cabinet full of lethal concoctions with which he doses himself. If anyone needed murdering, it is Robert.

His long-suffering wife Bertha has decided that she has had enough of his belittling her, his violent temper tantrums, his crazy theories, and his reluctance to get another job after being let go from his engineering firm. The family is becoming insolvent and soon won’t be able to afford even their very modest house in a less desirable part of Shuffflecester. She also finds herself drawn to her husband’s cousin, a sympathetic successful writer who returns the attraction. And she has another admirer, Dr Wilson Bagge, her husband’s physician who has witnessed Robert’s bad behavior toward his wife.

She decides to poison her husband with small doses of lead acetate (which has a sugary taste) and can be easily procured as an ingredient for a hair-wash. At the exact same time Dr Bagge plans to create a nostrum with alum which consumed over time is lethal. So both would-be murderers execute their plans. Unfortunately, alum is the antidote for lead acetate and lead acetate is the antidote for alum poisoning! Robert, instead of dying, becomes remarkably healthy and both ill-wishers are stymied as to why he is full of energy and even more nasty than usual.

Robert, does indeed expire, but how was it accomplished? By Bertha? By Dr Bagge? By Robert himself? Murder? Suicide? Accident?

If anyone doubts the author’s firmly placed tongue-in-cheek, just look at the names of the minor characters: Professor Pulverbatch, an expert on poisons; Miss Ethel Poundle-Quainton, a cousin; Mr. Keyes Yelford; an officer of the court; the coroner's jury including Moggerdill the butcher, the coal merchant Mr. Woolhanger, the tobacconist Mr., Bimble, Mr. Twamley, Mr. Quatt and Mr Beerhouse. If Ascoyne D’Ascoyne had lived in the town, he would undoubtedly have been on the jury!

This was nothing as I expected. Not my cup of tea. I don't post negative reviews so I will not publicly post.

This is a great read for all cosy crime readers - it hits the right amount of characterisation and suspense throughout the novel. Compared to the other Anthony Rolls book published recently by The British Library Crime Classic series (Scarweather) this novel has been carefully crafted - it doesn't contain any dull or plodding sections like so many cosy crimes and interestingly it lets the reader see whats happening at the time it happens rather than dwelling on how an Inspector is investigating the crime. It is impossible even with a fly on the wall account of whats happening to work out whodunnit - this novel is one of the best of the cosy crime re-issues from this series. I would give this book 9 out of 10.

"Family Matters" is crime fiction that was originally published in 1933 and is set in England. This is one of the oddest crime novels I've ever read. It's not a mystery as we're told exactly who is poisoning Robert, how they are doing it, and what the bizarre result is. And yet, at the end, it's hard to say exactly who and what finally killed him. Also, we're apparently supposed to be rooting for the poisoners, so don't expect a typical mystery novel's ending.

The story started by describing the location and the many characters. As this information came all at once and before the scenes started, I quickly got muddled about the details. But correctly remembering these details didn't really seem to matter. Once the action started, the author still spent more time telling the reader about the characters than using scenes to show their personalities. On the other hand, I'm not sure I could take much more of Robert than we got, so maybe it's just as well. Anyway, the writing style is more like someone is telling you about this bizarre occurrence than watching the events unfold.

There was no sex. There was some bad language. Overall, I'd recommend this to people who enjoy bizarre crime stories with quirky characters.