A recent comment on the Golden Age Detection Facebook group sent me back to Patricia Wentworth and Miss Silver this week. I picked up The Brading Collection (Hodder & Stoughton, 1950), the 18th in Miss Silver’s adventures, later published as Mr. Brading’s Collection.
The Brading collection is a hoard of incredibly valuable jewelry amassed by Lewis Brading, a wealthy, acquisitive and unpleasant man. Brading has turned his country house into a resort and built an oversize vault nearby for his jewelry and lives there with a secretary that he is blackmailing to stay with him. He approaches Miss Silver for help, as he feels something is wrong. He says he has the sensation that someone has been on the premises despite the security precautions he’s taken. Miss Silver advises him to donate the jewelry and allow his secretary to leave, which Brading declines to do and Miss Silver refuses to work with him.
Miss Silver is not surprised to learn a week or so later that Brading has been found shot in his sanctum. The secretary of course is among the chief suspects. There’s also a cousin that was set to inherit until Brading decided to marry and made a will in his fiance’s favor just before his death. The will has vanished, putting the cousin high on the persons of interest list. The relative with kleptomania was seen dropping a valuable diamond brooch from the collection into her purse, and then the fiance’s boyfriend is still around and might reasonably resent the coming wedding.
Various individuals visited Brading throughout the afternoon preceding his death and all of them swear he was alive when they left him, until the cousin enters the annex and finds Brading dead. The resulting quasi-locked room puzzle relies heavily on the timeline and the truthfulness of the various suspects.
The characters often are as interesting in Wentworth’s stories as the actual mystery and that is certainly the case here. The obligatory romance is between the inheriting cousin and Stacey Mainwaring, a portrait artist. The two had been married and divorced a few years earlier for a misunderstanding. I found Stacey less appealing than many of the Wentworth heroines. The most interesting character is a retired vaudeville actress staying at the resort, large, lame, and ugly by her own declaration. She provides a lively and amusing stream of chatter throughout the book.
Wentworth created fictional places for her stories and I find myself pulling out maps trying to place the action based on clues in the text. Brading lives in Ledstow, which is near Ledlington and the sea. The Welsh border is mentioned as not far away and the site of a previous book The Catherine Wheel is said to be nearby, which involved smuggling, so I placed both towns somewhere in the southwest of England.
The Miss Silver stories are comfort reads of the very best kind. Enough of a puzzle to keep the mind engaged and vivid characters that are noteworthy, but action mild enough that a check under the bed for potential killers before retiring at night is not needed. Always a good answer when wondering what to read next.