Margaret Reid Duncan Gilloran (1918–2009) was born in Scotland. She worked in an office for a few years before attending law school and practicing as a solicitor. After her retirement she combined her love of crime fiction with her legal experience and began writing mysteries. Her first mystery was published when she was 65 years old. She used the name M. R. D. Meek for her series about solicitor and private investigator Lennox Kemp and the pseudonym Alison Cairns for her books about solicitor Toby Wilde.
Lennox Kemp appeared in 15 books between 1983 and 2004. The intriguing title of the first book, With Flowers that Fell (Robert Hale, 1983) is drawn from a poem by Swinburne. Kemp is working as a private investigator in the firm of McCready’s Detective Agency after losing his license to practice law. The reason for the loss and his path to reinstatement to the bar is a significant part of the narrative.
McCready’s accountant George Thurston asks McCready to look for Thurston’s wife, who disappeared a few days before. Thurston had reported her missing to the police who assumed the obvious, that Susan Thurston was bored with her marriage and left with someone else. Her husband is confident that did not happen and Susan’s friends agreed. One told Kemp that Susan was a little naïve and young for her age and the idea of her eloping was out of the question, which of course left more sinister possibilities.
A day or two later the police found Susan Thurston’s body along with the body of a patient from the nearby psychiatric hospital in a wooded area. The police classified it as a murder-suicide but could not account for the five days between Susan’s disappearance and her death, which the postmortem showed occurred soon before the discovery of her body. Thurston asked Kemp to reconstruct her last days; Kemp was uneasy enough about Thurston’s mental state and the discrepancies in the information he had that he agreed to pursue it. Kemp is a persistent and intuitive investigator, unwilling to accept the obvious answers, which led him down a circuitous path to an unexpected resolution.
The disgraced law enforcement officer or attorney who falls back on private investigation was a newer idea in 1982 that it is now. Kemp offers a twist or two on the theme such that it isn’t completely redundant even after so many other series have been based on a similar premise. Also incorporated into the story is subtle criticism of the often wrong assumptions made about psychiatric patients and of the tendency of police to jump to conclusions in order to close police cases quickly.
I read several of these books years ago and remembered finding them low-key but well told and intelligent. The later ones are easier to locate in the secondary market than the earlier ones and a few are available in ebook.