Lament for Leto (1971)
1971 Michael Joseph blurb:
Dame
Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, taking shelter from the rain in the
British Museum, encounters a middle-aged archaeologist named
Ronald Dick whom she last met in Greece many years previously. He
persuades her to join another expedition in that country to visit
various shrines and temples dedicated in the Golden Age to
Apollo, who was the son of Leto by Zeus.
The party turns out to be an ill-assorted one and, of the ten people who form it, only the leader is seriously interested in its object. Six of the members are young and, on the whole, frivolous; and, in any case, harmonious relationships are jeopardised by a selfish woman novelist whom almost all the others would soon like to see dead.
In the end one of them kills her and it takes Dame Beatrice to work out the identity of the murderer.
<>The author has been twice to Greece, so that the various locations are authentic and, apart from the story itself, the book should appeal to all lovers of the Cyclades, the Peleponnese and the city of Athens.My review:
While I had dismissed this book as a dull and lifeless retreading of
Come Away, Death (no doubt
occasioned by reading the one straight after the other), a rereading
reveals it to be quite a pleasant travelogue, if an indifferent
detective story. Amongst the entertaining tourist stuff around
Greece, there's some decent character work and witty (if monotonously
unlifelike) dialogue - closer to Wilde's epigram than natural
conversation. The murderer turns out to be the character marked
from the beginning, which is preferable to Mitchell's often arbitrary
solutions, particularly after the nadir of the 1960s. A pleasant,
if minor, work.