The Mistletoe Wedding Murders by Denzil Meyrick with Ian Moore review: 'A snapless Christmas cracker'
This final novel by the late Denzil Meyrick certainly has an ingenious plot but it could have been much more tightly written, writes David Robinson
Denzil Meyrick always used to pride himself on writing fiction that couldn’t easily be pigeonholed: his Kintyre-set DCI Daley books are less bleak and certainly less urban than most tartan noir and his three novels starring the hapless Inspector Frank Grasby novels more farcical and preposterous and with a higher body count than you’d find in most cosy crime.
The Mistletoe Wedding Murders is the third in the Grasby series, set in 1950s Yorkshire, and Meyrick was working on it when he died last year. It has been completed by writer and stand-up comedian Ian Moore, and it is entirely to his credit that you can’t (or at least I can’t) see the join.
What you can see straight off is the absurdity of the whole set-up. First-person narrator Frank Granby, a police inspector, is generally loathed by his father, Cyril, “Yorkshire’s most miserable retired vicar”, who is about to be married to the “well-known occultist” Hetty Gaunt. The ceremony will take place at Christmas at Rowantree Hall in deepest Yorkshire, where she will be joined by her brother Neptune, aka Bob, a fat former plumber from Filey who is a druid, and her cousin Hironima, “the greatest witch in ten generations” who used to work at Cooperative Fleshings in Withernsea, where she was known as Mabel.
As their car approaches Rowantree Hall, a farmer warns them of the Black Knight, the ghost of Rowantree Hall (“If he’s about, there will be death, and that’s a fact”). Once inside, Mabel the witch does indeed sense the presence of death, and she’s not wrong: in the rehearsal for the wedding, the aged minister conducting the service keels over. Poison, thinks Gransby, after attempting a kiss of life and detecting the taste of bitter almonds (cyanide?) Outside, falling snow turns into a blizzard.
So far, so predictable, and if you’re looking for a Golden Age-type black comedy, Kate Atkinson’s last Jackson Brodie novel Murder at the Sign of the Rook has an almost identical setting (country house, Yorkshire, snowstorm) but is far more tightly written.
While in the Rowantree Hall’s basement, Frank Grasby hears what sounds distinctly like the sound of an argument followed by a gunshot coming from a couple of floors above through to the mansion’s aged pipes. “‘Not the only thing that gets carried through the waste pipes,’ my father adds in a rather off-colour manner, eliciting some pearl-clutching from Mrs Hollis, and a chuckle from his fiancee.” The “off-colour” is superfluous, the “pearl-clutching” a cliché, and it’s not funny anyway.
Characterisation is basic, and sometimes barely attempted: Grasby’s girlfriend is “an exquisite combination of US cavalry and LIFE magazine pin-up girl” while the owner of Rowantree Hall is “the very archetype of elderly Church of England orthodoxy”. Grasby himself, I should add, has less cardboard to his character, and is a very particular mixture of uselessness and courage, stupidity and insight, though I do wish he would curb his habit of offering a sarky comment after every other line of dialogue, especially when they don’t make sense. “I suspect Mrs Rushton wouldn’t let me near her with someone else’s bargepole, let alone mine, even if I had one,” Frank says at one point. Eh?
I am probably being too censorious here. I have not read Meyrick’s two previous Christmas novels, and cannot tell which of the occasional duff lines are his and which are Moore’s. Granted too, looking for psychological depth in a Christmas caper - one in which the hero battles the Black Knight on the mansion’s rooftops in a snowstorm and a female murder victim is dressed as a vicar while made up as a witch - is clearly absurd.
No: the plot’s the thing here, and it is indeed ingenious. It twists and turns and there is a clue early on which I did spot but whose significance passed me by completely. So yes, Meyrick and Moore fooled me. A bit of a snapless Christmas cracker all the same.
The Mistletoe Wedding Murders, by Denzil Meyrick with Ian Moore, Bantam, £16.99
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