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Did you ever find yourself liking a book in spite of yourself? MRS. JEFFRIES PLEADS HER CASE is not my usual cup of tea (I ordinarily take to a strong English Breakfast or Assam and this is more like a mild Darjeeling). But quality tends to rise to the surface in more than just one type of tea, or one sub-genre of mystery book. As early as page 3, I began to suspect that the book was in the realm of pure fantasy, although clothed as an historical police procedural, and my view was quickly confirmed. It takes place in late Victorian London, where Detective Inspector Witherspoon lives by himself in a large house that he can afford because of inherited money. Of course the house requires a considerable servant staff, and Witherspoon's is presided over by a housekeeper, Mrs. Jeffries. There is also a coachman, who is independently wealthy but prefers to work as a servant, a cook, a maid, a footman, and some others who in this book happen to be away. The primary function of Mrs. Jeffries' unofficial detectives, however, is as a murder investigation team par excellence. Honorary members of their group include a medical doctor and a Lady Ruth Cannonberry. They also have an untold number of "sources." They deplore any length of time without a murder and can hardly wait until another one takes place. The coachman and the maid are engaged, but keep putting off their marriage because "neither of us was ready to give up our murders." The good Inspector Witherspoon himself is a pleasant-natured dope (Peter Sellers of course would have been ideal for the movie version), a perfect example of a man promoted far beyond his abilities. He sprinkles his conversations and thoughts with quaint expresssions, and he is full of self-doubt. Almost every question he asks a suspect is followed by a fearful thought that he has gone too far, and he wonders what made him be so bold. He does have some good ideas, however, those instilled in his mind by Mrs. Jeffries. She programs him each evening by joining him in having a glass of sherry and making observations about his cases that he takes to be his own thoughts. His police companion, Constable Barnes, who sounds as if he might have graduated from Oxbridge (he uses expressions such as "Acrimony seems to have been the order of the day"), is also helpful in keeping Witherspoon on a correct flight trajectory. An engineer is thought to have committed suicide, but his landlady thinks it was murder, and the landlady used to be Witherspoon's superior's nanny. So Witherspoon is assigned to investigate the case and soon agrees (with some sotto voce help from Mrs. Jeffries) that it was murder. The main suspects are the directors (and to a lesser extent their wives) of the failing company the engineer worked for. Much of the book involves Witherspoon and his constable going from suspect to suspect to gather information, while Mrs. Jeffries's "shadow cabinet" counterpart group spreads out to various locales to develop their own information. They have scheduled meetings to collate their information, and Mrs. Jeffries regularly finds a way of passing along the critical points to Witherspoon without him realizing that she is being more than a mere sounding board for his own ideas (he doesn't have many). I especially liked one scene (p. 135-6) where Witherspoon is interrogating a suspect and his wife, and it gradually develops from the wife's answers that she detests her husband, who is just beginning to become aware of this fact. She contradicts his answers continually, but in the end finally confirms one important point. He states that after he and his wife left a restaurant, she went home and he -- well, he took a walk by himself. "That's true, Inspector," the wife says, and explains that a friend of hers saw her husband walking in the neighborhood of the murdered man at the time of the killing. To her husband she observes sweetly, "You must have been so close to poor Mr. Westover just as he was dying. What a pity you didn't go around to see him. You might have saved his life." I found this clue-by-clue development quite interesting, and it made me want to read on and on to learn how it all fit together. So even though the story is fantasy (and actually, aren't all murder mystery novels fantasies in their own way?), it was still absorbing. The characters are rather delightful, the plot holds its own, like most Victorian settings this one has a kind of charm, and the ending is satisfying. There were a few distractions, but I tried not to let them bother me. There were too many repetitions of epithets I had never heard of, such as "Blooming Ada," "Blast a Spaniard" (which I suspect may have become archaic not long after the 16th century war with Spain), and "ruddy" (which was probably a euphemism for "bloody", although I fail to see why such a euphemism is needed today). Without checking them all out, I also got a feeling that many words and expressions used in the book were ahead of their time, such as "suss," which is not in the OED first edition, or "cuppa." Certainly it's misleading to state that "the precise time of death could be learned" (from examining the wound in cases where there were no witnesses). "Window of time" seems too modern an expression, as does "rush to judgment." However, John Dickson Carr points out in one of his books that we should be careful about assuming some current expressions might not have been used in various historic times, and Shakespeare is full of clever "modern" expressions, so I hesitate to be too positive in this matter. Judging the book as a whole, I liked it. I can see why there have been at least 16 "Mrs. Jeffries" books published so far. There are a lot of people who enjoy Darjeeling tea, and every now and then I like to vary both my tea and my reading. The "entertainment value" in MRS. JEFFRIES PLEADS HER CASE is high.
Reviewed by Eugene Aubrey Stratton, May 2003
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