“A wealthy bachelor drops dead at a ball and a young lady takes on the decidedly improper role of detective.” The first of my murder mysteries for the spooky month of October.
In anticipation of Hallowe’en I’m reading as many murder mysteries as I can squeeze in during October. By the time the actual day rolls around I should be suitably prepared for all the ghosts and goblins that show up at our door.
To begin this delightful spin through detectives, both amateur and professional, and the mayhem that seems to follow in their wake, I began with a recent parody of the classic English cozy mystery*—this one of the closed door variety.
A Most Agreeable Murder: A Novel (2023) by Julia Seales is the debut for a writer who seeks to be Jane Austen with a modern twist (of the knife). Swampshire, where this tale is set, is the easily identifiable small English township. However, here there is a strict code of conduct for true ladies. As the publisher notes, Beatrice Steele—our feisty and passionate heroine—“is terrible at needlework, has absolutely no musical ability, and her artwork is so bad it frightens people. Nevertheless, she lives a perfectly agreeable life.” But Beatrice harbors a secret: “She is obsessed with murder. Not the act of committing it, but the act of solving it.” She especially loves trying to solve mysteries published in the crime column in the London papers written by the famous detective Sir Huxley. “If anyone in her etiquette-obsessed community found out, she’d be deemed a morbid creep and banished from respectable society forever.”
The very eligible bachelor Edmund Croaksworth is set to attend Swampshire’s annual autumnal ball. Beatrice’s mother, Mrs. Steele, hopes he will use the event to become engaged to our heroine’s younger sister Louisa and thus save the family home from the hands of their despicable cousin, Martin Grub. (Swampshire. Croaksworth. Grub. You are getting a sense of the level of the humor here.) Croaksworth arrives with Sir Huxley’s former assistant, the disgraced Inspector Drake, in the middle of one of Swampshire’s interminable hail storms, dances a bit, plays some cards, has a drink, and falls over dead from poisoning. Beatrice and Inspector Drake form a highly unlikely partnership to get to the bottom of the mystery and find the murderer from among the hosts and guests who have been locked in the old manor house to wait out the storm.
Jane Austen fans who look for the occasional spoof of the genre will probably enjoy this book more than the casual murder mystery aficionado. I fall into the latter category. It wasn’t until the book’s final third, when Seales stops trying so hard with the over-the-top humor and gets down to the real hunt for the murderer, that I became fully engaged.
As a light-hearted start to a month of reading murder mysteries, it was a nice, harmless way to set the stage.
More to come . . .
DJB
I found this book through a staff recommendation at Solid State Books. For my review of the bookshop, see Installment #21 of my 2026 DC-region independent bookstore visits series.
*I was unfamiliar with the term “cozy mystery” when I jumped into the murder mystery genre during the pandemic. Wikipedia has this definition:
“Cozy mysteries (or cosy mysteries) are a sub-genre of crime fiction in which sex and violence occur offstage, the detective is an amateur sleuth, and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community. Cozy mysteries thus stand in contrast to hardboiled fiction, in which more violence and explicit sexuality are central to the plot. The term ‘cozy’ was used to describe works in this genre by the 1960s, though it only gained widespread recognition in the late 20th century, when various writers produced work in an attempt to recreate the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.”
Mysterious manor house photo by T on Unsplash
