Elizabeth Lemarchand (1906-2000) was a teacher in girls’ schools, becoming headmistress before her early retirement due to illness. She took up writing short stories and then detective novels, basing her style on the Golden Age mysteries she admired. She published 17 police procedurals between 1967 and 1988, all featuring the team of Tom Pollard and Gregory Toye who started out as Chief Detective Inspector and Sergeant and progressed upward through the ranks as the series unfolded. Not surprisingly, she placed her debut mystery in a girl’s school. Death of an Old Girl (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1967) takes place at the end of summer term at the annual reunion when the board of directors convenes and all alumna are invited to return.
Helen Renshaw, headmistress of Meldon, is used to coping with former students who don’t want to see anything about their beloved school change. She instituted a number of sweeping updates when she took over amid a huge outcry but some 12 years later most of the opposition had given up except for Beatrice Baynes. Miss Baynes lives directly across from her beloved school and she has nothing better to do than to monitor the teachers and the grounds daily. Renshaw was braced for her complaints in front of the large audience that would be attending the board meeting but no one was prepared to find Miss Baynes murdered in the art department she so despised.
Of all of the days in the school calendar, the annual reunion was possibly the worst to establish a person’s whereabouts at any given time. The event involved dozens of people not ordinarily on the campus and unplanned meetings between old friends in addition to displays of student work in most of the classrooms for event attendees to examine. No one noticed the people around them and everyone could devise a reason for being almost anywhere if someone did notice them.
A theft at Miss Baynes’ house on the same day gave Chief Detective Inspector Pollard and Sergeant Toye food for thought and the shifty great-nephew due to inherit most of the Baynes estate was an obvious suspect. But no one could deny that the murder was tied to the school in some way.
Detailed timetables hearken back to the railroad schedules of 1930s detective stories and a nice map of the area around the school helps the reader orient themselves to the scene. Lemarchand worked in more than one surprise in the last quarter of the story including the motive. Fans of Golden Age mysteries and police procedurals will appreciate this book. Readers who need constant action may find the narrative slow going.Â
The Times Literary Supplement, November 16, 1967