by Marion Babson
The Players
The Grande Dames
The Complication
The Victims
The Suspects
Cameos
The police
Old-film buffs - especially old mystery-film buffs, will enjoy this light confection.
Narrator and retired actress Trixie Dolan has been reunited with diva Evangeline Sinclair after a feud of some twenty years. The two sixty-somethings, still in full possession of their faculties and physicalities, travel to London to be guests of honor at a Film Retrospective for the great Evangeline Sinclair, she who ‘put the ‘sin’ in cinema.’
They are met at the airport by Hugh Carpenter, an Englishman who is in charge of the retrospective season. Carpenter gets on the wrong side of Evangeline from the very beginning. Things are not much helped by the fact that they are being put up not at a ritzy hotel but in an apartment. Trixie and Evangeline have the first floor to themselves, but a group of five young people, drama students all, occupy the second floor.
And that night, they discover that the Presence behind the Retrospective is Sinclair’s old and long discarded flame Beauregard Sylvester, who has sunk a fortune into the theatre/film restoration complex called The Cinema in the Sky. At present, his venture isn’t doing at all well. Neither is his third marriage.
Although Trixie suspects that if murder is to be done, it will be Evangeline tossing Beuregard off the roof of the Cinema in the Sky, she’s wrong. It’s when they return to the flat, after the first night of the retrospective, that the two women see one of their flatmates carrying the body of a woman down a flight of stairs.
This launches the two women, as well as the reader, into a delightfully comic tale of manners and morals and murder most English. Why did someone murder Fiona and put her in the bedroom not of her boyfriend but of a mere acquaintance? Why does someone kill Mick and then scalp him, ala the murder method that Evangeline Sinclair had employed in one of her movies of so long ago? Why does Trixie’s daughter, Martha, fly to London and cause havoc?
Although Trixie and Evangeline do precious little investigating of these murders, they move in the circles with the murderer and are in at the ‘death,’ and indeed prevent murders three and four.
The only flaw in the ointment is Trixie and Evangeline’s rather cavalier acceptance of the first murder – there’s no mourning for the dead girl, no acknowledgement of her at all except as a body to be got rid of, to which they become tacit accomplices. Nevertheless, justice does will out in the end, and it’s an entertaining journey with two charming and memorable companions.
Trixie Dolan
Evangeline Sinclair
Martha Dolan
Fiona - appears only long enough to die
Mick - he got rid of one body, and see how he was repaid
Hugh Carpenter
Jasper
Gwenda
Ursula
Des
Annie
Beauregard Sylvester
Juanita (Morez) Sylvester
Dame Cecile Savoy (actress friend of Evangeline, knows all the gossip)
Detective-Superintendent Heyhoe
Detective-Sergeant Julian Singer
This review copyright
May 24, 2000.
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Reel Murder is currently out of print. It is available from used bookstores: www.abe.com.
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