Dean Street Press has reprinted all twelve of the mysteries written by Annie Haynes (1865-1929). Haynes didn’t survive to see the Golden Age of Detection at its apex but she did help usher it in. Her second mystery was the first appearance of Inspector Furnival of Scotland Yard. The Abbey Court Murder was published by The Bodley Head in 1923 and Dean Street Press re-issued it in 2015. Crime fiction historian Curtis Edwards wrote the Dan Street Press introduction.
The story is a Victorian melodrama. Judith Carew flew up the social ladder, from governess to wife of Sir Anthony Carew, owner of a considerable country estate, in a few short years. Two years into the happy marriage a former husband she had believed dead appeared and demanded that she return to him. Judith agreed to meet him in secret in a flat on Abbey Court, at night of course, and she took a small pistol to protect herself. During a heated argument the lights went out and a third person unknown to Judith shot and killed the former husband. Her white dress was bloodstained (who wears white on a secret night-time mission?) and she fled down the stairs to avoid the elevator operator’s scrutiny. There she encountered a friend of the now-dead husband who made it plain his silence had a price.
The rest of the story deals more with Judith hiding the truth from her husband than Furnival’s investigation of the murder, although that is addressed. An unfortunate romantic entanglement of Carew’s younger sister, a long-ago love interest of Carew’s seeking to break up their marriage, a French lady’s maid that Furnival goes undercover to interrogate, there’s no end to the well-drawn and emotionally exhausting characters. This book reads a lot like Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances, which I was not expecting.
I guessed the killer but not the motive. Haynes did a fine job of hiding it in plain sight. She wrote well and kept the story moving. The plot is too dated for me and the overwrought verbal exchanges and bouts of hysteria are wearing. All of her books were produced in a seven-year span, so she didn’t have much time to grow as a writer. Still, reading one of her last books might make an interesting comparison to this one.