I looked at Elizabeth Ferrars’ first book about Andrew Basnett last year, which I liked enough to want to sample more of her considerable body of work. This week I read her first story about Virginia and Felix Freer, a hopelessly mismatched married couple. Virginia is deeply honest and Felix is a con man. He managed to deceive Virginia as to his true character long enough for her to marry him but after three years of unpleasant surprises, she left. They have not divorced and Felix drops in on her occasionally. That’s where Last Will and Testament (Collins Crime Club, 1978) opens. Virginia returns from the home of a family friend, who died earlier in the day, to find Felix has let himself into her house.
Because the only relatives, a niece and a nephew, both lived at a distance, Virginia notified everyone and helped the young secretary and housekeeper cope until the lawyer and family arrived. Felix says he’s staying to provide moral support but Virginia has been burnt before and can’t help but wonder what he’s up to. The recently deceased was fond of making and discarding wills so no one knew quite how matters were left. The family and lawyer were sorting through papers, looking for the most recent will and current bank statements, when a collection of valuable miniatures disappeared along with the housekeeper.
While this book was written in the late 1970s, it feels much older and I am trying to decide why. Certainly the confusion about wills and inheritances is straight out of the Golden Age. The collection of miniatures is a dated touch, too. The relationship of Virginia and Felix is anything but old-fashioned, though. It made me think of Jon Breen, who called Ferrars “ahead of her time in her strong women characters and views on gender relationships” in his Mystery Scene review of E. X. Ferrars: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction by Gina Macdonald (McFarland, 2011). Felix is fixated on Virginia and will do anything for her except go straight. She is drawn by his charm but knows he’s fundamentally dishonest. She sees no way out of the quagmire since Felix is unwilling to let her go. How this very odd couple progresses no doubt unfolds in later books. The writing feels similar to the Christies of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The multi-prong mystery is intriguing. It becomes unexpectedly dark about midway through with multiple murders. Felix turns out to have some detective skills, although I wondered, as did Virginia, how much of it he already knew. For fans of the Golden Age, especially Agatha Christie.