Tag Archives: Peter Zander-Howell

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Bedroom Window Murder,’ by Peter Zander-Howell

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The other day I reviewed Machinations of a Murderer, by Peter Zander-Howell, a straight-up serious English police procedural mystery set in the 1940s. I enjoyed it immensely, and straightaway bought the first book in the series, The Bedroom Window Murder.

We meet our hero, Inspector Philip Bryce, as he drives to a country house in Hampshire along with his new partner, Sergeant Haig. In the classic tradition of British fiction, these two Scotland Yard detectives have been dispatched from London to investigate a baffling murder out of town. The justification for this official trip (which I understand never happens in real life), is that the victim, Sir Francis Sherwood, was a friend of their boss.

Sir Francis was found dead at his bedroom window, shot in the head by a .22 bullet. The problem that baffles the police is that there seems to be no one in the world – nobody – who hated Sir Francis. He was famously good to his employees, and as a magistrate he was notoriously lenient in sentencing. Everyone who knew him appears genuinely distraught at his death. A rifle found abandoned on the lawn appears to be the murder weapon, but to whom did it belong?

Solving that problem will involve a process of elimination – excluding the impossible, though (as Bryce emphasizes) identifying the impossible is often harder than Sherlock Holmes stories suggest. It will also give Inspector Bryce the opportunity to meet an attractive, available woman – who is, alas, also a suspect. The final resolution presented a moral problem for this reader, but a twist at the end made even that ambiguous.

I didn’t enjoy The Bedroom Window Murder quite as much as the Machinations book, but that’s because this is a classic country house mystery, and lacks the originality of MoaM. But it’s very good of its kind. It plays no modernist games and is faithful to its time and place.

For me, one educational benefit of this book was learning about a landscaping feature called a “ha-ha,” of which I’d never heard before. It’s a wall behind a recess in the earth, intended to block entry to a flower garden without cutting off the view.

A very good book. I like this series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Machinations of a Murderer,’ by Peter Zander-Howell

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I was surprised to find an authentic, old-fashioned British mystery, set in the 1940s, when I picked up Machinations of a Murderer by Peter Zander-Howell. A very original book, I thought, in an un-original form. It’s a plain, point-by-point police procedural, following first the murderer as he plans and carries out his crime, and then the detectives as they deconstruct his too-clever-by-half alibis.

Dr Robin Whittaker is an Oxford PhD, once a promising scholar. But his weaknesses for alcohol and gambling doomed his academic career, and now he works at a lowly job in a provincial museum. His wife, who has some money of her own, keeps him on a short leash. He chafes at the clean living she forces on him, and decides his only reasonable course is to murder her. Confident in his superior intellect, he’s certain that the alibi he constructs, along with the frames he constructs for hapless alternate suspects, will fool the stupid police, leaving him free to drain the funds he’ll inherit.

It’s not at all certain that even the ordinary police would actually fall for his hubristic scheme, but in the event local detectives are not available, so the police call on Scotland Yard for help. They send Chief Inspector Bryce (himself an Oxford-trained barrister) and his assistant, Sergeant Haig. They quickly recognize the doctor as a wrong ‘un, and put themselves to the task of breaking his rather neat alibi. It would disappoint Whittaker to know that one of the key clues in the case will be uncovered by a young, fairly inexperienced policeman who’s assisting Bryce and Haig.

There are no mysteries here. The reader observes everything as it happens, step by step. The great pleasure of this book (and it was a great pleasure to read) is the moral thrill of watching as a prideful and thoroughly unlikeable criminal slowly weaves for himself the rope of lies that will eventually hang him.

In all of Machinations of a Murderer I detected only one hint of a modern sensibility, and that was an intentional irony. Otherwise the author plays it straight from the 1940s. This absence of wokeness and political correctness was entirely refreshing. Aside from the narrative being fascinating in itself.

I highly recommend Machinations of a Murderer. Thoroughly enjoyable.