Morna Doris MacTaggart Brown (1907-1995) wrote several novels under that name before adopting the pseudonym Elizabeth Ferrars, which became E. X. Ferrars in the United States. Her first mystery was published in 1940, the initial outing of Toby Dyke, a journalist in Devon, and the last was published posthumously in 1997. Her output was steady, 72 books by my count in 55 years. She wrote mostly stand-alones but she did create series about Toby Dyke; Andrew Basnett, a retired professor of botany; Virginia and Felix Freer, an estranged married couple; and Superintendent Ditteridge.
She was a founding member of the Crime Writers’ Association in 1953 and, in the early 1980s was given a Lifetime Achievement award by the Association.
In his Mystery Scene review of E. X. Ferrars: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction by Gina Macdonald (McFarland, 2011), Jon L. Breen states: “Morna Doris McTaggart (1907-1995) was a prolific mystery writer, from her debut in 1940 with Give the Corpse a Bad Name to A Choice of Evils in the year of her death…. She was one of the best and most unfairly neglected of the generation of classicists who emerged at the end of the Golden Age of Detection, a puzzle-spinner in the Christie mode who was ahead of her time in her strong women characters and views on gender relationships.”
Curtis Evans examines the changes in her writing over her lifetime in his blog here: http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-country-cottage-murders-of.html?m=1
A few of the titles in the Felony & Mayhem reprint of the Andrew Basnett series came my way recently. The first one Something Wicked was originally published by Collins in 1983 in London and in New York the same year by Doubleday. F&M reissued the entire set of six in 2020. Basnett leaves his comfortable flat in London to stay in his nephew’s cottage in the village of Godlingham in Berkshire while his nephew is in Paris for the winter. Basnett is looking forward to peace and solitude to continue working on his book. That of course is not what he gets.
The residents living next door promptly greet him and fill him in on the village gossip. He is startled to learn that his neighbor across the road is believed to have killed her husband several years previously, although two more neighbors give her a firm alibi. Nonetheless she is shunned by the village. She is the prime suspect when another villager turns up dead, this time in Basnett’s living room during a severe snowstorm.
The first murder is something of a locked room mystery, as everyone supplied solid alibis for the time in question. Alibis are harder to establish for the second one because of the disruption caused by the snowstorm. Basnett understandably becomes caught up in the investigation and the personal quirks and strong animosities of the villagers.
A little lighter and cozier than the crime fiction I generally look at but this book had enough complexity of characters and plot to keep me reading. Looking into Ferrars’ earlier books is part of my winter reading plan.