It’s no secret that I love the works of Georgette Heyer. Like most of her fans, I’m most familiar with her comedy of manners/regency romance novels, but I’ve been slowly working my way through her Country House and Superintendent Hannasyde mysteries, which were contemporary at the time they were written. Most of them are eighty to ninety years old. The mind, it boggles. Surely, the 1980s were twenty years ago, and World War II is part of living memory for much of the population, right?

Right?

Apparently not.

In any case, I recently read Heyer’s work Penhallow, and I think it’s an intriguing book and worth commenting on. Be warned; there will be spoilers.

Penhallow takes place in Cornwall at some never-precisely-named time between the world wars. It centers around the Penhallow family, a herd of loud, boisterous, amoral gentry ruled over by their tyrannical patriarch, Adam Penhallow, until he’s murdered via poison. Mr. Penhallow was married twice and had a zillion mistresses, and eight of his children are fairly major characters in the story, along with his second wife Faith, the spouses of two of the children, cousins, a widowed sister, and various servants.

And the narrative gives character studies for all of them. It’s actually hard to tell who the main character is, there are so many character arcs going at once. The narrative POV is no help; it switches smoothly from one character to another without a break. We even get the murder from the murderer’s perspective. Spoiler: It was Faith, the trampled and maltreated second wife. She poisoned him because he was trying to force all of his children to live under the same roof and be his thralls, and she didn’t want them all to be trapped together and unable to live their own lives. She’d mostly accepted that as her lot in life, but couldn’t stand the thought of making her son and her stepchildren do the same.

And if you thought that was a weird spoiler, try this on for size: She gets away with it. I don’t think I’ve ever read a cozy-type mystery where that happened. I’m not too upset about this, because Faith is very clearly shown as an abused wife at the end of her rope- though she’s also annoying from a reader’s perspective; poisoning her husband is the only moment of agency and independent action she has in the book, then she goes back to being helpless. It’s realistic, but not what I expect from a character arc. And even that moment of action turns out badly, when another character commits suicide because, while he knows he didn’t kill Penhallow, he thinks there’s enough evidence to ruin his life over the matter (there isn’t). Faith may have gone mad with guilt in the last chapter; the narrative isn’t quite clear whether her breakdown is permanent or just another bout of hysterics.

But where is the murder? My edition of Penhallow is just over five hundred pages long and Penhallow is murdered around page 350. It’s like the author got so wrapped up in the characters that she sort of forgot about the plot and realized late in the story that Penhallow actually needed to die at some point. Because it’s Heyer, and she was an excellent writer even when she was off her game, all the character studies are in service to the plot and they feel natural, but with eight named children, a wife, and various other relatives to examine, it’s a lot to wade through.

After all that character work, the police investigation feels perfunctory, and I’m still not clear on why there was one. Penhallow was in physically poor health and had been told to quit drinking and carousing by his doctor, lest it kill him, and he didn’t. There was no reason for the police to suspect murder, except that nearly everyone in the house wanted Penhallow to die. So the fact that they investigated it at all felt rather contrived. And the setup for the suicide at the end was right on the line between subtle and contrived; it required the most patient, level headed character in the book to panic and shoot himself, on the grounds that he thought he’d be disgraced, but he couldn’t wait a few hours to find out if he was right or someone was bluffing. Because he’s been shown to have an extremely high regard for his honor, suicide in the face of disgrace isn’t totally ridiculous, but all he had to do was wait and see if it was a bluff, and decide what to do once he knew one way or the other.

As I said, it’s not a bad book, but it is a little strange. I think there’s just too many twists for one story. It’s fine to have one or two, but I counted at least four major points where the story diverged from what I was expecting. And the problem with contrivances and twists is that I start getting nit-picky when I find one, and I end up going through the whole book with a fine-toothed comb to find the rest. Like I’m doing here. If Penhallow had been murdered closer to the beginning of the book, or even halfway through, I might not have cared about the rest, but the placement of the murder made me start thinking, and here we are.

My thoughts on Penhallow are best summed up as, it was a good book and well-done, but it twisted and inverted a whole bunch of genre conventions. From an author whose stock in trade was fun, predictable narratives with happy endings, this was rather a surprise. I liked it, but if you decide to give it a try, caveat emptor.