Hither Page: A Romance (2019)
By Cat Sebastian
Self-published, 224 pages
★★
I don't remember exactly how Hither Page came to me for review. I guess it was sent my way because I read a lot of mysteries and have a fondness for Agatha Christie's English mysteries with eccentric characters.
Hither Page has some amusing stuff in it and is diverting, but it also has features that irk me. A lot of people try to write like Agatha Christie but they are too often Christie simulacrum. It’s not as simple as mixing a few oddballs, a quaint English village, a murder or two, and befuddlement before revelation. I don't wish to accuse author Cat Sebastian of being a mere copycat, but I can understand how many readers could draw that conclusion.
There's another genre of writing and film-making that makes me impatient. I call it the striptease, a form of expression where it's very obvious early on that two characters are hot for each other and will end up in the sack. It doesn't really matter to me if the characters are straight, gay, animal, mineral, or vegetable, but when you can see it coming from a mile away you just want the characters to get on with it.
As Page and Sommers Book One, the novel introduces us to James Somers, a doctor who is squeamish around blood and violence, and Leo Page who does investigation work for an agency headed by Sir Alexander Templeton who is probably blackmailing Leo, who is gay at a time in which such activity is unlawful. As it turns Doctor Sommers has the same proclivities. There's a whole lot of eyeballing, obsessive thoughts, and suppressed urge in this novel, but there was absolutely no doubt that the two are going to become lovers. So get on with it already and cut to the mystery.
It takes place in an English village called Wychcomb Saint Mary immediately after World War II. It's a place full of gossips, cranks, loonies, and clueless rich people who could have been drawn from the Monty Python upper class twit of the year sketch. There is Colonel Armstrong and his handsome secretary Edward Norris, a lady killer by which I mean in the cad sense not the sanguinary. There is grumpy Marston, a name plucked from a Eugene O'Neill play, a nervous recluse who had been a POW during the war, drinks too much, and lives alone in a cottage in the woods. Daniel Griffiths is the local vicar and his wife Mary was probably once pretty but is now down-at-the-heels. Add Miss Edith Pickering, who hired a “daily woman” house-cleaner who pokes around where she's not supposed to. Mrs. Hoggett, the cleaning woman in question is our first corpse. She leaves £1000 to 15-year-old Wendy Smythe who befriended her, but where did a cleaning woman get that kind of money?
There's a lot of kind of back and forth in this novel. Apparently lots of people in Wychcomb hold grudges, so many that Colonel Armstrong rhetorically asks Page, “[H]ave you ever met a rich man somebody did not wish to kill?” (Ya’ think that might be foreshadowing?) There's a subplot of a missing drug Veronal, a barbital, that fits the theory that Mrs. Hoggett was dosed and pushed down the stairs, and an attempt on Leo's part to pass himself off as an architectural expert who is writing about the local church’s features. He is so obviously not a scholar that villagers see through him quicker than it takes to polish off a biscuit and a cup of tea. How about back stories about who is heir to the colonel's estate, meddling Home Office agents, and relatives who might be non-relatives.
Cat Sebastian has a husband and three children but according to her website likes to write “steamy, upbeat historical romances” usually with one or more LGBTQ+ characters. Meh! That's fine, but this is a very messy mystery and an extremely sappy love story. There's a second book but I think I shall duck it. And I know for certain that Agatha Christie remains on her throne.
Rob Weir
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