Near the beginning of Mixing with Murder, Ann Granger’s sixth Fran Varady novel, Fran, speaking from the heart, says, ‘It would be nice to have someone who’d walk in, when everything was going wrong, and make it come right.’ What Fran really, really wants to be is an actor but she hasn’t made it yet, so she does a bit of this and a bit of that just to keep afloat, anything that’s legal and lets her keep her independence. But wherever Fran goes trouble follows. This time it’s from club owner Mickey Allerton and his two heavies, especially Ivo, a muscular psychopath with an attitude problem. Mickey wants Fran to take a message to Lisa, one of his dancers, who has decamped to Oxford. Fran doesn’t like or trust Mickey but he’s holding her beloved dog Bonnie as hostage so Fran has no choice: to Oxford she must go. However, Lisa isn’t interested in Mickey so Fran thinks she’s off the hook. But then Ivo’s corpse is found floating in the River Cherwell after which things go from bad to worse, even though her friend Ganesh, strait-laced, prosaic, but deeply loyal to Fran, comes to her assistance.
In A Rare Interest in Corpses, Ann Granger has a new sleuth, Lizzie Martin, and a new milieu, Victorian London. Lizzie, who, after her father’s death, is alone in the world, has taken on the post of companion to the widowed Julia Parry. She is told that her predecessor, Madeleine Hexham, disappeared one day without warning and is suspected to have run away with a man (in Victorian England, really scandalous behaviour) although no-one knows who he might be. Mrs Parry is kind enough in a rather vacuous way and her nephew, Frank, who lives with his aunt, is engaging and amusing, although rather lightweight, but Mrs. Parry’s friend, Dr. Tibbetts, is another matter: boring, pompous, prejudiced.
Meanwhile, Inspector Benjamin Ross of the Metropolitan Police Force is inquiring into the murder of a young woman whose body has been found in the wreckage of houses demolished to make room for the new station of Kings Cross. Believing that the body is that of Madeleine, he calls on Mrs. Parry. And there he recognises Lizzie: when he was a pitboy in the Derbyshire coalmines, Lizzie’s father had been the local doctor and it was through his benevolence that Ben was able to get the schooling required, even then, to become a policeman. This link draws the two together, and, while they investigate the mystery of Madeleine’s death, their friendship grows into something more.
There are similarities and differences in these two books. Both feature strong, determined young women detectives yet they are separated by time, one being present-day and the other historical. Fran Varady has always been one of my favourites: Whatever life throws at her, and it throws a lot, she always bounces back; her outlook is essentially optimistic. Even though Mixing with Murder has more bleakness than other Fran Varady novels as when she reflects on her own Hungarian family, now all dead, there is also humour: the fearsome Mickey Allerton confesses to Fran that he tried and failed at the Adkins diet! And, as for Fran herself, surely one day her luck will turn: ‘I’ll make it to the real stage one day, you’ll see,’ she says. A Rare Interest in Corpses is altogether darker in tone: the wider context of that story is its social setting: Ben Ross, in the wrecked houses where Madeleine Hexham’s body has been found, is struck by the ‘insidious miasma seeping from the walls: poverty . . . despair an odour all its own’. From the minute details of Victorian life such as cows actually milked in the street and the details of a Victorian autopsy, to the overall picture of the wholesale demolition of whole areas of London to make way for the railways, symbols of the future, the meticulous research compels respect just as the narrative grips the reader.
-----------------
Radmila May
Other Fran Varady novels by Ann Granger: Asking for Trouble, Keeping Bad Company, Running Scared, Risking It All, Watching Out