Murder by Invitation (A Lady Eleanor Swift Mystery)
This is the fifteenth in a series featuring the intrepid Lady Eleanor Swift and her faithful and equally intrepid butler, Clifford. It has a setting worthy of Wodehouse: an English village in the Twenties on the eve of the king’s birthday celebration, and the traditional cast of eccentric villagers, one of whom is strangled early on. Since everyone in the village wanted to kill him, it’s left to Eleanor and her fiancé, Chief Inspector Hugh Seldon, to unravel it all. The best parts are the descriptions of munificent breakfasts and a hair-raising venture into the depths of an abandoned mine.
Anyone who has ever had to chair a patriotic event will identify with the beleaguered Eleanor, but I did find myself wishing that the authors (a husband-and-wife pair) had been more careful with authentic language. “No problem” was not a phrase in use until the 1960s; something that is not “even a thing” is a century too new. “Blown away” and “the suits,” meaning the county council, don’t ring right either, and the occasional lapses into stage Englishman veer too far in the other direction—Lord Fenwick-Langham calls Eleanor “old fruit” three times in one scene. It is not easy to carry a set of characters through fifteen books and counting, though, and lovers of all things country British may be more forgiving.
