Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
A Danish slant on the Golden Age: party snow-bound in a country house, murder, and an investigator with presence. Christie has done it, Conan Doyle, Sayers. Oskar Jensen evokes them all, with tweaks, in the wilds of Northumberland.
Nine characters are involved: a rich recluse in his palatial bolthole attended by one devoted servant, and seven former students with whom he was at University ten years ago. Then they were bonded by propinquity; now they find themselves united and intrigued by the mystery of their host’s intentions. Why has he summoned them to this bleak border country?
An answer comes quite soon but (following Golden tradition) only to produce more mystery. For this man, who was a nonentity as a student, on leaving Uni. had gone on to discover technology. He had formed his own company, flourished, and sold everything to retire in his thirties, a wealthy man.
At a grand and memorable dinner he announces that he is dying of an incurable condition and leaving £50,000 to each of his friends present. Everything is legal, two lawyers among them confirm it. The beneficiaries are variously bewildered, relieved, even resentful, at news of such a windfall.
That night the millionaire is shot in his bed, the gun to hand with his suicide note.
Among the guests is Torben Helle: a Danish historian whose command of English culture and language is imperfect but, under the veneer of lovable fool, (and a streak of vanity) there is a high level of intelligence. It’s Helle who suspects that his host’s manner of death was faked, that this was a murder cleverly rigged to resemble suicide. And because the party has been incarcerated since the snow fell and there are no tracks outside the house, it must have been an inside job.
With the help of an off-duty cop, and an academic researching literary crime Helle assumes the role of investigator. Delving in dark corners, he ferrets out people’s recollections of events at their university ten years ago: their reactions and behaviour at the time and since. The atmosphere becomes over-loaded with grievances and guilt and any parallel with the Golden Age breaks down. Because this is no simple whodunnit; “why” is paramount. Both perpetrator and motivation are horrible, post Freudian, and quite a shock to our modern sensibilities.
Not a great debut novel but different, and Helle is neatly flawed and attractive as Jensen’s intended series character. I look forward to his next appearance.
