ECR Lorac, published 1948. Published in America as Place for a Poisoner.

I’ll start by saying I find E.C.R Lorac’s (born Edith Caroline Rivett) writing consistently enjoyable and I’ll forever be grateful for British Library Crime Classics to introducing her to me. I find she’s a bit more subtle than Christie, with less of the acerbic wit that comes through in Christie’s writing, instead with a subtle humour and an interest in the wideness and peculiarity of humanity. While Christie is clearly most comfortable capturing the upper middle classes she herself belonged to, Lorac has a wider range, with farming folk, housekeepers, policemen, academics and more appearing in her books, often fleshed out with clear insight into their daily lives.

This novel starts out with the poisoning of an elderly man, James Marchment and an obvious suspect – his nurse, now fiancé who is disliked by all, and judged to be a hard and greedy woman with a quick temper, hidden under a facade of respectability. Even the question of why she might have killed her fiancé before the wedding (thus losing out on his fortune) is answered by a shady past and potentially another victim in a former patient. But why has the charwoman disappeared?

Spoilers below

One of the things that jumped out to me whilst reading was the characters of Matthew and Jeremy and the question around their explicit queerness. Now they aren’t the first gay couple in golden age fiction, and there’s some fantastic scholarship around Christie’s work in this regard, but Matthew and Jeremy really stood out to me. Firstly, this book is earlier than A Murder is Announced, with Miss Murgatroyd and Miss Hinchcliffe (1950), another sympathetically written same sex couple shown living together and showing great devotion. Matthew and Jeremy live together in a small flat in London. They’re also comic theatre performers together, and maybe “two old cronies” with little money, who have performed together for 30 years would live together without anything deeper going on. Yet, Lorac writes these characters with such affection for each other and such simple domesticity, it leaves one questioning if they could possibly be anything else other than a couple.

“Old Jeremy, he fusses over me like an old hen” … “Matt’s under the weather … and I’ve persuaded him to stay in bed, seeing as it’s Sunday. You’ll find he’s all nice and warm and cosy in there”.

While I’m not writing this to erase platonic love and affection, and there’s certainly nothing unusual about sharing a house with one’s best friend, then or now, I will make the point that Matt and Jeremy belong in the list of potentially queer couples semi hidden in golden age detective fiction.

The central mystery of the book – who killed James Marchment is covered well enough, with an amusing nod to the effectiveness of police procedure and “Good old Somerset House” cutting what could have been a very long person hunt short. Like others of Lorac’s writing though, what stands out are the characters themselves – the two brothers, so different from each other in temperament and ambitions, Mrs Transome, a housekeeper of the old school ways, and indeed Matther and Jeremy themselves, two aging comic performers. The novel also acts as a snapshot of post war London life, with the old ways, portrayed by Mrs Transome and her love for The Hollies (the house where she works) shown fading away as she battles to get reliable staff, and mentions the problems caused by rationing – Nurse Dellaton not sharing her sugar rations despite eating at the house is given as one example of her “hard grasping” character. We also have the character of Bill (one of the two brothers) who having fought during the war is now no longer able to settle back into life as a chartered accountant – “I think it’s difficult for us stay-at-homes to realise how the war has altered the outlook of some of the men who seemed so well fitted for a sedentary life in the professions prior to 1939”.

To jump to the end of the book, and to add to my semi-argument, Lorac gives Matt and Jeremy a romantic ending, one that evokes that of Jackie and Simon in Death on the Nile – that of double suicide.¹

“I suppose I ought to feel that I failed in my duty in not having taken them into custody, but I’m glad in my own mind that they finished their own lives. By the time we got into the house they were both dead. They must have put their last shillings into the gas meter to ensure a peaceful end.”

The two men, who have been together always since they met during the first world war, had an ending that shows as much as anything Lorac’s sympathy for them, dying together as they lived, quietly and peacefully. The other characters all express their relief that this was the version of justice the men received, based on their likeability (“poor old buffers”) and the lack of likeability of the murdered man, deemed to have “deserved what he got to some extent”. There is indeed a general dismay that the murder isn’t the strongly disliked Nurse Dellaton and the juxtaposition of her and Matt and Jeremy is an interesting study in the psychology of crime.

1. I’m aware that in Death on the Nile, it isn’t a true double suicide, due to Jackie shooting Simon and then herself, but it’s the closest I can think of for now – any other suggestions please do send my way! ↩︎