12 Horses and the Hangman's Noose (1956)
Blurb:
My review:
This is a very pleasantly rural, yet undoubtedly minor, story, involving horses, smuggling, and boats—as such, it is one of her sports-centred novels. The book is often very funny, the “tongue-in-cheek quotations fill me with quiet joy”—indeed, “we deal in quotations. These do, sometimes, of course, apply to everyday life”; and the teachers are very funny. The mediocrity is due mainly to the fact that it is Laura Gavin (no longer Laura Menzies) who is at the centre of the book, Dame Beatrice (no longer Mrs. Bradley, her D.B.E. due to her having “vetted the psychology of the Women’s Forces, or something, during the war”) being relegated to the sidelines—although Dame Beatrice does, in fact, solve the mystery, she does very little. It is Laura who, when the victim is found apparently killed by a horse at his riding-stables, decides to clear the animal, arguing that “the horse couldn’t have killed him. I’m going to work on the presumption that somebody murdered him and made it look like animal savagery. I shall employ my full powers to shift the blame to where it belongs. I feel I should champion the horse”. Although it is after Dame Beatrice’s speech at the Opening of the School that the body is discovered—“a bizarre situation. He might as well already be at his funeral, surrounded, like this, with flowers!"—it is Laura who makes the connections with the original case, and Laura who has all the adventures. The plot is not particularly strong—although the murderers are well-hidden, the motives are somewhat weak, and there is no proper feeling of satisfaction at the end. Thankfully, Dame Beatrice would be at the helm in The Twenty-third Man.