Initially, L. J. Hurst worked in the backrooms of the media industry. He now divides his time between work for an international scientific publisher and a rather more British independent bookseller. In years past he was a regular attendee at the Shots on the Page Festivals from whence Shots Mag sprung
Death on Heron’s Mere was published in the USA as Death Finds A Target, with an extremely misleading jacket illustration when it appeared in 1942, a year after its British first edition. Penguin brought out their green paperback in 1948.
It first appears to be a novel of society changing – Heron’s Mere is the lake in the grounds of Heron’s Hall. And the Hall has a new owner and residents: Simon Gabb and his extended family. It has become available because the Lafortes ran out of money and had to sell up, which makes it both convenient and inconvenient that the young Laforte members have been allowed to take residence in the South Lodge on the estate, while Gabb heir Giles is courting Arden Laforte. That is, old money and new money, and benefactors and their beneficiaries. The Gabbs are in trade, while the Lafortes are Society so it is bound to end unhappily. It seems to begin with suicide but – to the Gabbs’ relief, as a suicide in the family would be such a humiliation – is quickly discovered to be murder and Fitt’s detective, Inspector Mallett comes on the scene.
The Gabbs own a Birmingham iron works. First references make it appear that they “stick to road-nails and beacons” but it becomes clear that the firm is bigger, with armaments in its divisions. The “B” in BSA stood for “Birmingham”, remember, and the “SA” were “Small Arms”. The Gabbs we have to imagine are similar, and eventually we discover that one member of the family does bring work home occasionally. And the murder investigation will go into far stranger factories and workshops than the family empire before the motives for the crime are discovered.
Mary Fitt wrote thirty detective novels, but is sometimes called a precursor of the crime story as she is held to be more interested in character and psychology than puzzle. Consequently there is a lot of attention paid to relationships, some of them romantic, which leads to one small theme that no one mentions in Death On Heron’s Mere: two cousins may be preparing to marry, something possible in the Anglican church but nowhere in the Roman Catholic world. The benefit for the Gabbs is that it would keep the money in the family. And money, of course, is always a motive. Oddly, Fitt shows no sympathy for the Protestant work ethic, and on the last page we read about one character “he was willing to work, even to live in a house and catch trains and sell things, though he hoped it would not necessary”. This thought gives him “a vast unbelievable happiness.”
