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
“Whistle while you work, Hitler is a twerp” sang Private Pike in Dad’s Army. It wasn’t the first time that phrases like that had turned up: “Murder while you work” is not very different as a phrase. But murder is never funny.
Have you heard of the prosecutor’s fallacy: the belief that tends to make one conclude the guilt of someone or something, looking for evidence to support that misapprehension? I have to admit to that with Susan Scarlett’s Murder While You Work – a wartime mystery set and originally published in 1944 during the Second World War. Just look at the evidence – the word “murder” in the title, the title itself which is a pun on the wartime broadcast “Music While You Work”, and even the author’s pseudonym, “Scarlett” which has been a metonym for murder ever since Sherlock Homes made his first study. And then I discover that Dean Street Press, although they call it the author’s “only foray into the mystery genre”, have issued it in their Furrowed Middlebrow series, and that Susan Scarlett’s name probably had little connection to murder. Ms Scarlett wrote another eleven novels, all those eleven explicitly romances, and was just a writing persona of Noel “Ballet Shoes” Streatfeild.
But stop! While Murder While You Work is not a pure detective story with obvious plotting and cluing, and the theme of music alluded to in the title hardly plays a part, it is criminous, it does feature murder, and it does feature a Woman in Peril. In anything, Murder While You Work is gothic.
But then again – and Murder While You Work is a “but then again” sort of book – what about the character who used to a pharmacist, and what about the post-mortem and the poison that might have been expected not being found?
“You don’t know about my work, darling, I could be blown to bits tomorrow. That’s not much of a husband, is it”
“I don’t want to seem fussy, but as one who’s just missed popping off the world, I think you’re making rather a fuss about what is merely a possibility”
Those very rational lovers had also managed to stop the murderer. Perhaps the war had not destroyed everything, including the ability to write about it even while it was being waged.
