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Murder Most English

Recently, getting to know the new man in my life, I was browsing through his bookshelves and discovered he had all twelve of the Flaxborough novels. I knew instantly this man was for me, at least for the length of time it took me to reread these old favourites.

Colin Watson’s first crime novel set in the vaguely Lincolnshire market town of Flaxborough, Coffin, Scarcely Used, was published in 1959, the last, Whatever’s Been Going on at Mumblesby? in 1982 shortly before his death. A 1969 omnibus edition of the first three novels has endpapers that show a bird’s-eye view sketch of the town. There is the river, into which a body was tipped in 1972. There is Heston Lane where dwelt several of the town’s most respectable citizens until their sudden unexpected demise. There is Market Place, locus of the Friday market where in 1979 a carelessly driven car hit Constable Cowdrey as he was awaiting delivery under the counter of a pound of sausages. There also in 1977 did Robert Digby Tring meet his end by falling through the inexplicably unlatched door of a fairground ride, forty feet up in the air. And there is Jubilee Park where the drinking fountain erected to the memory of Lt.-Col. William Courtney-Snell JP was the meeting place of Lonelyheart 4122 and Lonelyheart 347 in 1967 and which several years later was blown up as a prelude to murder.

It isn’t quite the closed community of the Golden Age of Crime Fiction, but this town of 15,000 inhabitants is far enough from any city to form a world of its own, with a hinterland of seedy farms
and questionable manufacturies. Here live Justin Scorpe, lawyer; Barrington Hoole, optician; Leonard Leaper, cub reporter turned fanatical pastor. Walter Grope, commissionaire at the Rialto cinema, composes verse while herding the queues: ‘The river winds and winds and winds, / through scenery of many kinds’. On retirement he earns money writing ‘In Memoriam’ notices. Dozens of other fellow ci

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Recently, getting to know the new man in my life, I was browsing through his bookshelves and discovered he had all twelve of the Flaxborough novels. I knew instantly this man was for me, at least for the length of time it took me to reread these old favourites.

Colin Watson’s first crime novel set in the vaguely Lincolnshire market town of Flaxborough, Coffin, Scarcely Used, was published in 1959, the last, Whatever’s Been Going on at Mumblesby? in 1982 shortly before his death. A 1969 omnibus edition of the first three novels has endpapers that show a bird’s-eye view sketch of the town. There is the river, into which a body was tipped in 1972. There is Heston Lane where dwelt several of the town’s most respectable citizens until their sudden unexpected demise. There is Market Place, locus of the Friday market where in 1979 a carelessly driven car hit Constable Cowdrey as he was awaiting delivery under the counter of a pound of sausages. There also in 1977 did Robert Digby Tring meet his end by falling through the inexplicably unlatched door of a fairground ride, forty feet up in the air. And there is Jubilee Park where the drinking fountain erected to the memory of Lt.-Col. William Courtney-Snell JP was the meeting place of Lonelyheart 4122 and Lonelyheart 347 in 1967 and which several years later was blown up as a prelude to murder. It isn’t quite the closed community of the Golden Age of Crime Fiction, but this town of 15,000 inhabitants is far enough from any city to form a world of its own, with a hinterland of seedy farms and questionable manufacturies. Here live Justin Scorpe, lawyer; Barrington Hoole, optician; Leonard Leaper, cub reporter turned fanatical pastor. Walter Grope, commissionaire at the Rialto cinema, composes verse while herding the queues: ‘The river winds and winds and winds, / through scenery of many kinds’. On retirement he earns money writing ‘In Memoriam’ notices. Dozens of other fellow citizens weave in and out of the novels, here as a witness, there as a sub-plot, and now and again they commit murder. As well then that there, in the centre of town, in Fen Street, is the Police Station. Presiding over all is Inspector Purbright, a large unassuming man with a bland pleasant face beneath corn-coloured hair. Like all the best detectives he is keenly interested in irrelevancies and gossip, particularly that of fat Sergeant Malley, Coroner’s Officer, who knows everyone and everything. There is nothing angst-ridden about Purbright: he’s not divorced; he’s not an alcoholic; he gardens. He lives peaceably at 33 Tetford Drive with his wife Ann with whom he goes shopping on Saturday mornings. He is the quintessentially quiet Englishman, competent at his job, in which we suspect he finds some amusement. Such is his unfailing courtesy that no one, not his Chief Constable, nor his subordinates (one of whom calls him Sarky), can ever be sure whether he is secretly laughing at them or not. Purbright is ably assisted by Detective Sergeant Sidney Love, possessed of an innocent choir-boy face and a certain innocence of mind to go with it. But not as innocent as the mind of Chief Constable Harcourt Chubb, a breeder of Yorkshire terriers and geraniums, who never sits down but always leans, on mantelpieces, filing cabinets, desks. He has difficulty understanding that there are people of nefarious intent in the world: ‘“Not Flaxborough people surely.” There was a note of pleading in Mr Chubb’s voice’ (Coffin, Scarcely Used). Above all there is Miss (always Miss) Lucilla Edith Cavell Teatime, who wanders into Flaxborough in Lonelyheart 4122 and stays for eight more novels. She is a well-dressed woman of a certain age, and we know little of her previous history. She claims an upbringing in the Rectory, and I for one believe her. She once lived in Twickenham. The name Harrods is best not mentioned in her presence. On arrival in Flaxborough she finds it charming.
‘I do like the sea of course. Do you not find Flaxborough smells of the sea?’ ‘We have a tidal river . . . And there are docks.’ ‘I am very fond of docks. Not’, she added dreamily, ‘that I have ever been in one, you understand.’
Not marked on the map but easily located by the steeple of the church of St Lawrence is Church Close and the narrow Georgian house where she lives in dove-grey elegance. Her pursuits are various. Here she is the proprietor of a herb farm with only one product, Lucky Fen Wort (‘for Vitality and Improvement of Natural Functions’). There we meet her as the owner of the House of Yesteryear, selling antiques. In Broomsticks over Flaxborough she finds it expedient to be Operational Director of the Edith Cavell Psychical Research Foundation:
‘Edith Cavell?’ Miss Teatime blushed. ‘My middle names actually. Rather shame-making but the Trust insisted. They meant it kindly, I suppose, but people do not realize how unworthy of them is this persistent deference to money and aristocratic connection.’
But most of the time she is Secretary of the Flaxborough & Eastern Counties Charities Alliance. And charity for Miss Teatime begins at home. She is often one step ahead of Inspector Purbright in solving the crime but a Miss Marple she is not. If you visit her you will be served afternoon tea in the finest of bone-china cups. If you are an old friend you will be offered a slug of whisky to put in it. She will light up one of her cheroots. From the first paragraph of each of these novels you know you are in the hands of a master. The humour is wry, dry, occasionally surreal, frequently laugh-out-loud, but it never tips over into whimsy. The plots and counterplots, double-crosses and crossed wires border on the absurd but never lose sight of the basic requirements of a crime novel: a body, a murder weapon, a motive, an investigation and an arrest. There are the side-achingly funny set pieces: the Extraordinary General Meeting of the local witches’ coven, with chairwoman, secretary and Warlock Parkin making tedious points of order, while Mrs Gooding just wants to get her clothes off; the reluctant summer outing of the residents of Twilight Close; the visit to a barber by a spymaster in search of a lost agent. Scenes like these are to be savoured. It is Colin Watson’s skill that we, the readers, are privy to much that is hidden from the police but we can still be surprised by the dénouement. And it is his witty writing which makes us reread the novels time and again even though we know the outcome. Colin Watson was born in 1920. At the age of 17 he was appointed as a junior reporter on a Boston newspaper, and he spent his working life in Lincolnshire, latterly writing editorials for a chain of news-papers. He was a member of the Detection Club of Great Britain and he won the CWA Silver Dagger twice. In his photos, bespectacled, moustached, he looks like one of his own creations, a quiet, reserved Englishman, and by all accounts that is what he was. Who knew that he could see, under the bland surface of a quiet country town, the joyous anarchy of the ordinary citizen’s life? And if he couldn’t see it, he could invent it, and describe it in what must be some of the most elegant language of any crime novel. Watson also wrote two non-fiction books: Puritan (1966) and Snobbery with Violence (1971). The latter is a study of the English class attitudes that informed the crime novels and thrillers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sometimes, in his Flaxborough novels, he deliberately nods in the direction of these earlier writers, with irony and, dare I say it, some affection. He died at the age of 63 and is buried in the churchyard at Folkingham in Lincolnshire. On his tombstone is noted his profession – ‘Author’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 61 © Janet Walkinshaw 2019


About the contributor

Janet Walkinshaw lives in south-west Scotland. She has written three novels set during the Scottish Reformation: Knox’s Wife, The Five-year Queen and Lochleven. Her article was a runner-up in our 2018 Writers’ Competition.

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