I have long held an unjust bias against inverted mysteries of the written form. This isn’t to say that I dislike inverted mysteries in general, but for the longest time, I thought that inverted mysteries generally worked much better on filmed format – i.e. Columbo, Monk, Law & Order: Criminal Intent – than as a short story or novel. Thankfully, many rave reviews for several inverted mysteries across the GAD blogosphere have helped to show me the way. After quite a few successful experiences with inverted mysteries in the short form, I decided I needed to find a really great inverted mystery novel to get my start in the subgenre.
I’d already read one really good inverted mystery novel pre-Yarn to my knowledge: Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers. I was young and, while it was the first Sayers I really liked after a failed attempt at Whose Body?, which eventually I tried again and also liked. Both could be classified as more of howdunnits than inverted mysteries, but the culprit in Strong Poison is known essentially the whole time. So where to go next? There were a lot of top contenders, including multiple titles by Sayers and Freeman Wills Crofts, but I narrowed it down to two entries: Francis Iles’ Malice Aforethought and Henry Wade’s Heir Presumptive. Both have near-universal acclaim, but the former is much easier to get a physical copy of than the latter. However, even though it took much longer for me to get a hold of Heir Presumptive than Malice Aforethought, I just knew that it had to be the one I chose. My decision paid off a thousandfold.
The plot of Heir Presumptive had been compared (specifically by Jim Noy over at The Invisible Event) to a more dramatic version of the film Kind Hearts and Coronets, and for good reason. The main goal of the protagonists in both works are the same: kill everybody standing between them and becoming the heir to a British peerage. However, the motivation for it in Heir Presumptive is based much more in opportunity than in revenge. Our hero, Eustace Hendel, is a Harley Street doctor who, upon receiving an inheritance from an older paramour, was turned into more of a poker-dependent grifter. Currently down on his luck and on the verge of losing his girlfriend and what little remains of his social status, Eustace is at first unaffected by the news that two of his distant cousins, father and son Howard and Harold Hendel, have drowned in a freak accident. He starts to pay more attention upon realizing that they were the first two in the line of succession to the title of Lord Barradys, currently held by the senile Chandos. A trip to attend the funeral and a week’s stay at Henry and Julia Carr’s – Julia is a granddaughter of Chandos – reveals that Eustace is much closer to the peerage than expected. Due to the amount of late Hendels, and female descendants’ inability to be heirs, only two people stand between Eustace and the Barradys title: Captain David Hendel, a cocky WWI veteran, and his terminally ill son Desmond.
Eustace realizes that just becoming heir presumptive to Lord Barradys would solve most of his pecuniary problems, and with the almost threatening support of his lover Jill Paris – a modern Lady Macbeth if anyone ever was – he becomes resolved to kill David and let nature take care of Desmond. How he is to accomplish this is beyond him until an unexpected opportunity arises and he finds himself on a week’s hunting trip with David. Despite some last-minute tremors, Eustace ruthlessly follows through with his plan. However, some loose ends in his own murder plot, plus some irregularities in the laws about tenancy, make Desmond more of a threat to this plan. A new plot must be put in motion, but soon Eustace will realize that the threat of capture is closer than ever and that he is not the only Hendel worthy of suspicion…
It’s hard to summarize or discuss the plot of Heir Presumptive for two reasons. One is that, even for a novel that is relatively long for GAD, it is just chock-full of plot development and events. The other reason is that starting not even halfway through there are a series of plot twists and subversions that make Heir Presumptive the unique masterpiece that it is. It’s a hard decision to make, whether or not to discuss some of these earlier happenings. Despite having read many reviews which made me aware of these specific details, my enjoyment of the novel and of how it inverts the inverted mystery were not diminished. I think that not knowing about these twists, though, makes the reading experience even better, so I’ll try to leave as much of these later parts as I can in ROT-13 and talk more about generally what I loved about this book until then.
What really set this book apart for me besides (but in part due to) its inverted structure was how the third-person narration was affected by Eustace and his outlook within the story on his surroundings. When we talk about the trope of the “unreliable narrator” in relation to detective fiction, it is normally within the scope of the first-person narrator, and how unreliability can subvert (or damage) the notion of fair-play. Of course a couple notable examples come up here, which will be left unnamed to avoid major spoilage. However, Heir Presumptive still has an unreliable narrator of sorts, just a third-person limited one which mainly follows Eustace Hendel’s actions and inner thoughts. It’s easy to see from the outset that Eustace is heavily biased against the senior branch of his family, a.k.a. the one that carries the peerage. This is apparent in a number of places where he ruminates on the unlikability of many of his relatives like David, or the surprising compassion of others like Henry Carr, or Howard’s wife Blanche (technically Hendels by marriage only). Where the possible unreliability comes in is in the third-person descriptions of said characters outside of Eustace’s thoughts. How do we know that characters like David or Desmond are not shown through Eustace’s viewpoint even when it is not necessarily him we are seeing them through? This ambiguity really lends to the moral dilemmas that Eustace faces, and perhaps gives the reader a more empathetic view of a protagonist who should by all accounts be extremely unlikable, yet one cannot help but almost root for him as he slowly crawls closer to his goal.
And since essentially all of the characters are seen through Eustace, any discussion of the characters ultimately becomes a discussion of Eustace himself, the star of the show. What it is that makes Eustace so uncomfortably likable? It may be a combination of traits. Eustace is not just some sedentary, poker-playing man-about-town. He has an education in medicine which is put on full display when he is considering all the possible ways to murder David. He may not be the best in making life choices, but there is no denying that Eustace Hendel is intelligent. There is the sense that Eustace has a great desire for many of the things he has essentially been driven to murder for. Some are more materialistic, like money and status, but others are purer, like the ability to keep the love of his life. Even though his desires and his means of obtaining them are irreconcilably selfish, You just can’t help but admire Eustace a little for his pure tenacity and will. He is definitely one of the most complex characters (from a literary standpoint) in GAD.
Many reviewers have commented on the stark imagery of David’s death scene – it is not much of a spoiler to say that Eustace does follow through with his original plan – and that Wade’s unwillingness to shy away from how the actual deed plays out creates one of the most tense if not horrific scenes in GAD. Something that I think helps to create this sense of dread is the murder’s setting in the Scottish isle of Glenellich. Besides the opening, which in part takes place at the Carrs’ home during Howard and Harold’s funeral, and a short chapter where Eustace meets Lord Barradys at his lordly manor, this is the only extended scene of the novel which does not take place in London. Eustace has to commit this inconsolable act in a place he is unfamiliar with and where he is an outsider. Not only must he adapt to his surroundings to commit murder, but he must not arouse suspicion upon himself as the natural outsider. Wade’s description of Eustace’s journey by train to Glenellich only adds to the eerie atmosphere of a self-wrought impending doom:
He wondered where they had got to; his watch showed a little after seven, and just as he was dropping off to sleep again the train pulled to a standstill and he heard the plaintive cry of a Highland Porter: “Crrianlarrich. Crrianlarrich.” Then, in a momentary silence, the echoing cry of a bird: “Curlew. Curlew.”
With a sudden nervous shiver Eustace pulled the blankets round him and tried to sleep again. But sleep would not come. Something in that mournful cry had touched a nerve and a wave of depression flooded over him. In the cold light of morning there came to him the full realization of what he was going to do. Murder! Brutal, cold-blooded murder of a relation and a host. There was no blinking it.
Heir Presumptive, Chapter 7: “The Mournful Cry”
This excerpt here for me gets at many of the aspects of Wade’s writing that make Heir Presumptive such a success: the atmospheric depictions, complex yet strangely empathetic portrayal of a to-be-murderer, and an undeniable readability to counter the prose of Christie or Crispin.
The inverted nature of this mystery means that the plotting is done much differently than what we are used to from the average GAD book. For starters, the murder of Captain David Hendel occurs about 40% of the way through the novel, after the expository setup of Eustace’s position within life and his family, and the slow germination of his plot to kill David (helped by such provenances as David’s sudden hunting invitation to Eustace.) The inverted mystery I think generally has two main focuses. One is to show the initial motivation of the murderer as well as the creation of their plan and the actual performance of the deed, which may or may not go as it is meant to. The second is then the murderer’s efforts to get away with their crime and perhaps the psychological fallout of it, or in the case of something like Columbo or Inspector French, a switch of viewpoint to the detective character and how they will catch the killer. Heir Presumptive succeeds in detailing both of these, and I would say spends an almost equal amount on both, including a little overlap as Eustace for a time has to not only deal with his recent murder of David but must also decide if another murder must be committed. This is where we get into the many wonderful ways that Henry Wade has twisted the inverted mystery into something different, and for the next paragraph I will discuss these in ROT-13 so as to keep the surprises, surprises for any new readers.
Bs pbhefr gur ovt “gjvfg” gjb-guveqf guebhtu Urve Cerfhzcgvir vf gung vg vf nsgre nyy n fgnaqneq zheqre zlfgrel… be ng yrnfg obgu na vairegrq naq n erthyne zlfgrel fvzhygnarbhfyl. Jngpuvat Rhfgnpr fybjyl whfgvsl uvf qrpvfvba gb xvyy Qrfzbaq va uvf zvaq vf bar bs gur orfg cnegf bs gur abiry, nf jr frr gur jnl uvf guvaxvat unf orra nygrerq ol uvf arjsbhaq pevzvany pnerre. Ohg fbzrobql ryfr qvfcbfrf bs bhe qrne Qrfzbaq sbe Rhfgnpr, ubj avpr! Guvf perngrf n engure vagrerfgvat inevngvba ba gur frpgvba bs Rhfgnpr’f rinfvba bs whfgvpr. Abg bayl zhfg ur pbagvahr nibvqvat fhfcvpvba bs gur zheqre ur pbzzvggrq, ur nyfb unf gb nibvq fhfcvpvba bs bar ur qvqa’g pbzzvg juvyr gelvat gb svther bhg jub qvq gung bar. Vg trgf n ovg pbzcyvpngrq, naq urer V zhfg perqvg Jnqr jvgu n xrra novyvgl gb xrrc guvatf fvzcyr jurer gurl pbhyq ernyyl trg bhg bs unaq. Vg’f nyfb jbegu abgvat gung gurer vf abg bar znva “qrgrpgvir” svther urer jub orpbzrf gur nepu-arzrfvf bs Rhfgnpr, nf ur zhfg qrny jvgu va fhpprffvba, n Fpbggvfu “cebphengbe svfpny”, n Fpbgynaq Lneq qrgrpgvir, naq n pbebare. Hygvzngryl gur oynzr sbe Qrfzbaq’f qrngu snyyf ba nabgure cnegl, naq V qvq yvxr gur fbyhgvba urer (qrfcvgr n trareny ynpx bs pyhrf) orpnhfr gur zheqrere’f cyna nyfb rapbzcnffrq gur qrnguf bs Ubjneq naq Unebyq, nf jryy nf gur znavchyngvba bs Rhfgnpr vagb zheqrevat Qnivq uvzfrys. Gur jubyr gvzr jr unir orra sbyybjvat Rhfgnpr nf ur qernzf hc n zheqre, obgu ur naq hf gur ernqref unir orra cynlrq, naq cynlrq jryy.
I am glad then to officially report that this (not quite) initial journey with the inverted mystery subgenre, as well as a definite initial journey with Henry Wade, was a smashing success. Heir Presumptive is a novel that always stays engaging and easy to follow, even as Wade creates more and more strands of the plot that could threaten to over-complicate things. (Worth special praise here is the extremely useful Hendel family tree included in the beginning.) For a novel that is generally considered long for the GAD era – my copy, different than the one imaged above, was a meager 209 pages, but those pages were rather small print – the misadventures of Eustace Hendel went by in an enjoyable flash. I’m not too sure if Henry Wade wrote anything else exactly like this, but based on Heir Presumptive I’m convinced that his other works are well worth reading. As for the inverted mystery, I’m sure that at some point I will continue my journey with my runner-up contender for the first experienced, Malice Aforethought.
New Horizons Challenge: 19 works out of 25
Author: Henry Wade
The Challenge Requirements so far:
2/3 works translated into English
4/3 works written in English after 1970
3/2 works that are hardboiled or noir
2/2 works written by an American minority author
2/2 works with a musical setting
Other Reviews:
(I will give a warning here that some of the reviews do go into detail about sections I ROT-13ed, as well as sections I didn’t spoil at all, so be wary.)
‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’