Carson's Conspiracy by Michael Innes (Penguin, 1986)

CARL CARSON'S CRIME WOULD HAVE BEEN PERFECT--IN A DIFFERENT NEIGHBORHOOD

Carl Carson has a prosperous business, a dotty wife, and a fictitious son. When financial ruin threatens, he puts all these resources to use: he simply stages an elaborate "kidnapping" and liquidates his assets to pay the ransom. It might have worked, if Sir John Appleby hadn't been his neighbor. Appleby, lately retired from the Metropolitan Police, is intrigued by the rumors spreading through the neighborhood. But even he can't stop the conspiracy from turning into murder...

This is a bit newer than the books I usually blog about, but I couldn't resist simply because of the way the author describes Carson's favourite toy:

Of this particular telephone he was rather proud.  It didn't trail a cord.  (In this it was probably like the red one habitually toted around by the President of the United States.)  He could carry it, or it could be brought to him anywhere in the house, or even within the nearer reaches of the garden, and put into operation straight away.

--Page 37

Sometimes even the relatively recent past seems a strange and primitive place!

The Bloody Wood by Michael Innes (Penguin, 1977)

 

The setting is a gross parody.  The house party in the country house with its lawns and terraces ... and the nightingale singing in the copse on the hill.

But the hostess is a dying woman and her guests have expectations; the town is lapping up to the village; you can hear the traffic on the arterial road in between the nightingales' songs.

... And those nightingales.  They provide Appleby with the thread which leads to the heart of perhaps the most unpleasant tangle of events in his whole career.

Spoiler alert: The butler did NOT do it.

And there is a butler.  This is one of those British whodunnits where everyone is frightfully upper-crust--even the detectives.  It is a rather late entry in the genre--The Bloody Wood was first published in 1966.  Nonetheless it has all the traditional ingredients, including a country house party where most of the guests have a motive for murder.

Incidentally, if I'm ever invited to one of these shindigs (not likely, I know!) I'm going to say, "Thanks, but no thanks!"  The death rate at these parties is higher than in most warzones.

Kudos, by the way, to the author, who manages to make a reference to Agatha Christie on page  135:

'I suppose it's nonsense,' he said.  'But--do you know? - I never hear of a tape-recorder without remembering some mystery story or another.  By one of those dashed clever women who concoct such things.  Frightfully good.  Only, of course, I don't remember how it was brought in ... Sorry.'