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Murder and Walnut Cake

For my son Tom. Since it was a vain attempt to match his prodigious literary output that got me into this situation in the first place.

This slightly gushy (and therefore untypical) dedication at the front of Mrs Malory Wonders Why was the first clue I had as to how and why Hazel Holt created Sheila Malory. Thank goodness she did. Her stories about a middle-aged widow who solves murder mysteries saw me through a month in 2017 when two of my sons, simultaneously and both on the other side of the world, were seriously ill. Similarly, in March 2020 when it became clear that a pandemic was unavoidable and we had better hunker down or perish, I hunted out my store of Mrs Malories again. Everyone has an author whose work they turn to when it seems like the end of the world as we know it, and Hazel Holt is mine. She is something of a mystery herself, though.

The twenty-one-book series can’t be easily classified. The cover blurbs of the American mass-market paperbacks that form the bulk of my collection refer to Mrs Malory as a sleuth, conjuring up images of a hardboiled character patrolling the mean streets of downtown LA in a grubby raincoat, rather than a comfortably off grandmother who wears tweed skirts and lives in a thatched cottage on the edge of a small English seaside town.

Her best friend’s daughter is a police inspector who frequently has Mrs Malory helping with enquiries, in a non-euphemistic sense. But the books are hardly crime thrillers. There is neither sex nor violence, only a corpse and the intensely curious Mrs Malory, with her beady eye for detail and instinct for what makes people tick, working out whodunnit. ‘It’s the way I feel about people, from my own know- ledge of them, that makes me able to investigate them . . . You’d be surprised what you can find out from a little idle chat.’ The goriest passage

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For my son Tom. Since it was a vain attempt to match his prodigious literary output that got me into this situation in the first place.

This slightly gushy (and therefore untypical) dedication at the front of Mrs Malory Wonders Why was the first clue I had as to how and why Hazel Holt created Sheila Malory. Thank goodness she did. Her stories about a middle-aged widow who solves murder mysteries saw me through a month in 2017 when two of my sons, simultaneously and both on the other side of the world, were seriously ill. Similarly, in March 2020 when it became clear that a pandemic was unavoidable and we had better hunker down or perish, I hunted out my store of Mrs Malories again. Everyone has an author whose work they turn to when it seems like the end of the world as we know it, and Hazel Holt is mine. She is something of a mystery herself, though. The twenty-one-book series can’t be easily classified. The cover blurbs of the American mass-market paperbacks that form the bulk of my collection refer to Mrs Malory as a sleuth, conjuring up images of a hardboiled character patrolling the mean streets of downtown LA in a grubby raincoat, rather than a comfortably off grandmother who wears tweed skirts and lives in a thatched cottage on the edge of a small English seaside town. Her best friend’s daughter is a police inspector who frequently has Mrs Malory helping with enquiries, in a non-euphemistic sense. But the books are hardly crime thrillers. There is neither sex nor violence, only a corpse and the intensely curious Mrs Malory, with her beady eye for detail and instinct for what makes people tick, working out whodunnit. ‘It’s the way I feel about people, from my own know- ledge of them, that makes me able to investigate them . . . You’d be surprised what you can find out from a little idle chat.’ The goriest passages tend to be when Mrs M is cutting up ox heart for her dogs.
The books were published between 1989 and 2014, and by the end Mrs Malory is using the Internet and photographing the tyre tracks of a suspect on her smartphone, but all seem redolent of an earlier, gentler age. Set mainly in the fictional town of Taviscombe on the Somerset coast, hers is a world where there are still haberdashery counters, a Woolworths and ‘a proper ironmonger’s where men in brown overalls will still sell you half a dozen screws’. It reminds me of my own small-town childhood, which is probably why I find the books such soothing reading. Sheila Malory meets her best friend Rosemary for lunch at The Buttery and hears of the latest enormities committed by Mrs Dudley, Rosemary’s amusingly vicious gorgon of a mother. She endures committee meetings at which inevitably she is suckered into manning a stall at the Christmas Fayre or providing a cake for a Red Cross fête. She watches Coronation Street and pots up plants for the Help the Aged coffee morning, in between walking her dogs and tidying up after her disruptive Siamese cat. An Oxford graduate, she describes herself as being on the dustier fringes of the academic world. Her specialism is Victorian woman novelists; she often has a review to tackle for a literary magazine (typing a fierce condemnation of yet another study of Charlotte Brontë). She is always doing things ‘briskly’. No wonder. Within that structure, though, starkly modern issues are treated: paedophilia, coercive control, gay children rejected by their parents, old people left to dwindle in care homes. The latter provide the plot for mystery no. 3 in the series, The Shortest Journey, featuring Mrs Rossiter, a sweet, very rich widow, once bullied by her late husband and now bullied by her rapacious daughter – ‘one of those small, slim, energetic women who make me feel like a large, ponderous, slow-thinking provincial’. It’s a The Lady Vanishes tale with a wonderful somersault of an ending, and a narrative bound together, as are the others, by those descriptions of Mrs Malory’s day-to-day life.
Comfort food plays a large part: home-made jam from a glut of plums, ‘a rather good steamed chocolate sponge’ with which she feeds an unwelcome visitor, the soon-to-be victim in The Only Good Lawyer . . . (no. 8). In Death of a Dean (no. 7), afternoon tea in the cathedral (shortbread, walnut cake and coffee éclairs) is the scene of a murder for which Mrs Malory’s actor friend, David Beaumont, is the suspect. But what about Mrs Malory’s creator? Hazel Holt is best known as the biographer of Barbara Pym, whom she met in London in 1950 when both worked at the International African Institute in Fetter Lane. Holt was 22 and just out of Newnham College, Cambridge. She was Pym’s friend and ally for twenty-five years, ‘for much of that time sharing a small office with her, editing monographs, seminar studies and articles and reviews for the Institute’s journal Africa’. Pym taught her the craft of editing and infected her with the bug of find- ing out about the people they encountered. Lunchtimes, when they weren’t enjoying liver and bacon at the Lyons self-service restaurant in nearby Fleet Street, were ‘spent in public libraries, searching for clues in Crockford’s, Kelly’s Directories or street maps’. All this reminded me of Dulcie Mainwaring and Viola Dace hunting for details about Aylwin Forbes in Pym’s No Fond Return of Love. Thirty years of close friendship ended with Pym’s death in 1980, after which Holt set about selecting and editing her diaries and letters with the help of Pym’s sister Hilary, for A Very Private Eye (1984), before producing the biography, A Lot to Ask (1990). As Pym’s literary executor she also prepared four previously unloved novels for publication, including An Unsuitable Attachment, the rejection of which by her publisher had precipitated Pym into fourteen barren years.
What a frustrating job it was, though, to find out about Holt’s life beyond her connection with Pym. Even Dulcie and Viola would have found the going tough. The American paperbacks offer a stock photo of her on a garden seat wearing a plain shirtwaister and sunglasses. She is reading the Sunday Telegraph, with her head turned aside as if reluctant to be photographed, even by her son Tom. A short entry on Wikipedia reveals that she was born on 3 September 1928, married Geoffrey Holt in 1951, and didn’t start writing the Mrs Malories till she was in her sixties. As a girl, she had attended King Edward VI High School in Edgbaston, Birmingham. That rang a bell. I looked out Delay of Execution, no. 11 in the series, in which Mrs Malory spends a term at a girls’ public day school, in Birmingham, as a temporary English teacher after the death of a Jean Brodie type. The dedication is ‘For Barbara, Mary and Margaret, And all the rest of form 3c’. The school, with its plethora of new buildings among the ‘old, original Victorian structure’, is clearly modelled on Holt’s own; I took a look at King Edward VI’s website. The elusive Mrs Holt does not figure among the list of Notable Former Pupils. Reduced to tracking the rest of her progress through life via the cover blurbs, I found more snippets of information. The Only Good Lawyer . . . disclosed that she was ‘a former television reviewer and feature writer for Stage and Television Today’, and that ‘she now lives in Somerset with her husband, who is retired, and her cat’. A little more information came to light in The Silent Killer (no. 15), where it was divulged that she ‘currently lives on the edge of Exmoor, near Minehead, with her husband. Her life is divided between writ- ing, cooking and trying to keep up with her Siamese cat, Flip.’ I was amused that the cat now had a name, but the husband remained anonymous. By Death Is a Word (no. 21) her husband is not mentioned; it’s just her and the Siamese cat. How much of her own life experience went into the novels? In The Cruellest Month, the second in the series, Mrs Malory returns to Oxford, where a suspicious death in the Bodleian takes her back into her own student past and the ecstasies and delusions of first love. I thought it might be autobiographical, but it is a young Barbara Pym, described as ‘extrovert, full of naïve enthusiasms’ in A Lot to Ask, who comes to mind. The Cruellest Month, incidentally, was the book she most enjoyed writing: while researching it she was given tours of the Bodleian by a helpful librarian and saw the subterranean bookstore which few civilians are able to penetrate. She used it to provide part of the solution to the murder.
The plot of Fatal Legacy (no. 10) also contains echoes of that thirty- year friendship. Sheila Malory is involved in a murder case when she learns that she has been appointed as literary executor to an old friend who has died suddenly. Any other similarities? There is the Siamese cat. She has a son, Michael, who throughout the books progresses from Oxford to the College of Law, marries, settles in Taviscombe and provides grandchildren. Tom Holt trained as a law- yer, too, though he gave it up after a few years to become a prolific sci-fi writer. If only she had been more egotistic. After she died in 2015, posts on an online blog were testament to her popularity. Some, like me, had read the Mrs Malories multiple times. A bishop commented that he had discovered her work through membership of the Barbara Pym Society, and they had enjoyed a correspondence. Someone else lamented that no obituary had appeared in any of the British papers: ‘I expected to see something in the Guardian at least,’ one complained. I hope this piece will be some compensation.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 69 © Julie Welch 2021


About the contributor

Julie Welch was the first woman to report on football for a national newspaper, the Observer, and is the author of eleven books. Her latest is The Fleet Street Girls, which tells the story of the trail-blazing young women who entered the male-dominated world of journalism in the 1970s and 1980s.

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