Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village

Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village

By Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper

A weekend roaming narrow old lanes, touring the faded glories of a country manor, and quaffing pints in the pub. How charming. That is, unless you have the misfortune of finding yourself in an English Murder Village, where danger lurks around each picturesque cobblestone corner and every sip of tea may be your last. If you insist on your travels, do yourself a favor and bring a copy of this little book. It may just keep you alive. 

Brought to life with dozens of Gorey-esque drawings by illustrator Jay Cooper and peppered with allusions to classic crime series and unmistakably British murder lore, Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village gives you the tools you need to avoid the same fate, should you find yourself in a suspiciously cozy English village (or simply dream of going). Good luck! And whatever you do, avoid the vicar.

I can vouchsafe that this can be read in one sitting because I did, in fact, read it all in one sitting, while I was improbably stuck without phone or kindle with a sleeping baby on top of me.  The only book within grabbing distance* was Your Guide and serendipitously, I managed to finish the whole thing without waking the baby.  

It's one of those books that I've always found a bit gimmicky, you know, one hit wonders that are charming enough to pass the time, but are more for gifting, reading once, and then putting to the side and forgetting.  That being said, it was still delightful.  I'm probably a core audience member for it, since I got really into Midsommer Murders during the first year of the pandemic** and (as you may know) am very much into country house murder books by Agatha Christie***. And if you like Midsommer Murders and enjoy the idea that these little villages are constantly beplauged by murders, you will enjoy Your Guide. It covers all the bases, the village fete ("A nice way to spend a summer's day and thin out the local population"), people who leave messages ("All messages in a Murder Village are bad news. It means someone Knows Something. Don't leave messages. Don't hang around people who do."), the Folly ("It's a small, fake temple at the far side of the pond, perfect for picnics, trysts, and casual strangulations"), the farmer ("Constantly fielding offers from city folk who want to turn the farmland into a shopping center and fielding tthose same city folk who want to turn the farmland into a shopping center.") and of course, the vicar ("When you see the vicar, run.").

There's cute in-jokes about (ironically) the same trope that Connie Willis mentions in To Say Nothing of the Dog, i.e., that the butler did it for the first fifty books and then he became the most obvious suspect, so they had to use other people. And a couple of quizzes which test your knowledge and ultimately teach the greatest lesson of all: that sometimes, [SPOILER] in order to avoid being murdered, you must become the murderer.  True wisdom.

*Untrue, I had three books within grabbing distance, because I was still in my own house, after all, but How the Word is Passed isn't exactly light reading to pass the time while a ticking time bomb is waiting to go off on your stomach at any time, and the other book was soft cover and hard to hold without using both hands.

**I still enjoy them, but lack the time to watch them, what with the aforementioned baby and all.

***Mrs. Marple is probably closer to the Your Guide vibe, but I hate Mrs. Marple.  I know I've talked about this before****, and I know I should try again as an adult, but man, it's annoying to feel like half of Christie's oeuvre is unavailable to me because of that old bat.

****Maybe I haven't talked about this before! I loathe Mrs. Marple, her allusions to things like "Oh, it reminds me of the vicar and the bookblack boy" and then you find out the vicar stole the bootblack boy's money and the bootblack boy stood up in the middle of service and denounced him and the vicar went off and became a pirate out of shame, and so that's how you know that the real killer was the cook, because the cook was also doing it out of revenge, are so obnoxious as a reader, since we DON'T KNOW ANY OF THESE PEOPLE OR SITUATIONS and it feels like a cheat to keep the clues away from the reader to avoid spoiling the mystery too soon, and also Mrs. Marple acts so self-effacing, but she's just as self-satisfied as Poirot.  Call a spade a spade, at least Poirot acknowledges his own non-humility. 

*****This doesn't have any corresponding note above, so you shouldn't even be here but I also wanted to point out that Maureen Johnson is the author of the Truly Devious series, so I'm now a real fan of hers, and Jay Cooper's illustrations have a fun, Edward Gorey-esque tone to them which greatly enhances the book.

24: A Book You Can Read in One Sitting

Truly Devious

Truly Devious

By Maureen Johnson

Ellingham Academy is a famous private school in Vermont for the brightest thinkers, inventors, and artists. It was founded by Albert Ellingham, an early twentieth century tycoon, who wanted to make a wonderful place full of riddles, twisting pathways, and gardens. “A place,” he said, “where learning is a game.”

Shortly after the school opened, his wife and daughter were kidnapped. The only real clue was a mocking riddle listing methods of murder, signed with the frightening pseudonym “Truly, Devious.” It became one of the great unsolved crimes of American history.

True-crime aficionado Stevie Bell is set to begin her first year at Ellingham Academy, and she has an ambitious plan: She will solve this cold case. That is, she will solve the case when she gets a grip on her demanding new school life and her housemates: the inventor, the novelist, the actor, the artist, and the jokester. But something strange is happening. Truly Devious makes a surprise return, and death revisits Ellingham Academy. The past has crawled out of its grave. Someone has gotten away with murder.

Holy Shit! What the fuck did I just read?!  Take a secluded high school campus, a bunch of high-strung "genius" kids, a cold case 1930s Lindbergh-adjacent murder/kidnapping mystery, an actual dead teenager, the most dangerous game of Never Have I Ever ever, and end it on a bunch of frigging cliffhangers, and you'll get Truly Devious. 

You know what, I knew this was a bad idea.  This series is clearly identified as a trilogy, and only two of them have been published so far.  But the prompt!  And it sounded really cool!  So I stepped off into the pool and now here I am, hung out to dry, waiting on the next one to come out WHO KNOWS WHEN.  God, I hate WIPs.  This is going to be awful.

Suffice it to say, this got me out of the serious-book blues. And perhaps not surprisingly, I've already read the second book too, so we can talk about both in this review.  As you can tell, I did very much enjoy the book.  It can be confusing, and be aware that unlike many trilogies, this one is actually more like a single book than a series - things are mentioned and dropped, to be picked up (hopefully) in later books.  Questions are asked in Truly Devious that don't get answered until The Vanishing Stair, and others are left for the third. 

The lead character, Stevie, is not always very sympathetic, and there were a few times I was surprised by her actions (particularly romantically) which is a little odd, considering it's being narrated by her.  I also think the first book is stronger than the second (which is parodied in The Vanishing Stair, as Nate, the resident blocked author bemoans having to write a sequel - can't you just do a set-up and a denouement?) but given how closely intertwined and plotted out everything seems to be, I have faith that the author isn't artificially bloating the story or going to wind up writing the mystery into a corner.  It helps that people keep DYING, honestly, if we weren't following Stevie around I would probably have arrested her by now. It's not a good look to discover three bodies in a matter of a few weeks.  Especially since it's also her first semester at boarding school.  You gotta pace yourself, man.

I was also recently re-reading Murder on the Orient Express, which is also loosely inspired by the Lindbergh kidnapping, and it's interesting to see how each author has taken the story and molded it into very different murder mysteries.  Christie set up a classic revenge novel with the people whose family and friends were affected, and by the end, it's a visceral, cathartic feeling to know they'll get away with it.  In Truly Devious [And SPOILERS for The Vanishing Stair], the actual intended victims, Alice and Iris, are barely fleshed out, and our sympathies ride on Dottie, the clever, poor girl, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  The mystery is a puzzle, not a tragedy.  Although we do get some of Ellingham's sorrow afterwards, the way Truly Devious sets it up, it honestly sounded like he faked his own death, again alleviating some of the tragic consequences.  Now The Vanishing Stair seems to counter that, having him die in a confrontation with the kidnapper, but the whole picture probably won't come out until the third. 

It does feel a little cheap that after teasing the tin box in Truly Devious, we find out that Frankie and Edward are only very distantly involved in the kidnapping and then only by coincidence - they happened to write a threatening letter, as a prank, and Frankie's comments seemed to trigger the whole plan (accidentally), and it's also unclear to me how Stevie determines that they had nothing to do with the kidnapping, since I don't think the mere fact of their being students would eliminate them.  They could just as easily have hired minions to do the dirty work as the actual kidnapper did.

I can definitely see how it would get tiring to read three books all hashing out the same mystery from different perspectives, but Johnson does a pretty good job not just of giving new clues and insight, but also of creating large new mysteries to focus on, while leaving Ellingham in the background.  It's kind of the same problem that Veronica Mars, another excellent teen detective story, had, especially in the second season, and I don't think there's really a good around it, while still keeping the flow right.  In the third season of Veronica Mars, they went to several mini-arc mysteries instead, and that's not really doable here.

Overall, I am certainly intrigued and ready for the third book.  We still have to find out who projected the message on Stevie's wall (and what it means), where Alice is, or was, what actually happened that night, who killed Fenton, why Johnson seems to be trying to make Jenny Quinn a person of interest, whatever happened to Hayes and Ellie the night he died, how Ellie knew about the tunnels but couldn't get out again, and whoever is assisting Johnson on her legal references, because this whole nonsense about a secret codicil is in fact that: nonsense.  You can't prove up a will and leave out the codicil.  It's a public document.  Everything gets filed.  Now, it's possible that he wrote a trust and the "codicil" is actually a trust amendment, but in that case, everyone is calling it the wrong thing.  It was definitely possible for someone in that time period to do a trust, so I don't know why not just say it's a trust instead, and leave me some peace of mind, but all it does is bother the heck out of me.  Maybe book three will involve a discussion of why Vermont law in 1938 didn't require the filing of the will and codicil, which would be both hilariously specific to my interests as well as genuinely appreciated by this estates and trusts attorney. 



30: A Book Featuring An Amateur Detective