The leaves are changing colour, the days grow short, and it’s time to curl up in an overstuffed chair by the fire with another attempt to enjoy a murder mystery. People love murder mysteries. I tend to find them confusing, but this time I will pencil a list of characters to keep me straight. Let’s begin!
The setting is an luxurious but old wooden resort in the Muskokas, during a particularly hot weekend in August. The floorboards creak. The hallways are sinister and not well lit. An owl hoots, odd for mid-day but we will not be picky.
The Mordred family are guests at the resort for a family reunion. All the guests have murky pasts. The cabin in the woods has a murky past. Peter is the absent-minded father, accompanied by his second wife. Julie is the resentful daughter. Sally is her friend and possible lover. Is Mrs. Greatcourt the owner of the resort or the laundrywoman? I check my list. She is the owner of the resort but she has an obsession with properly folded sheets and towels, which is not fair play by the author. I check his biography. He has written nineteen LeClerc mysteries and owns property on Saltspring Island in British Columbia as well as in Hawaii.
Retired inspector Soufflier LeClerc is also at the resort on this sinister weekend, on holiday with his adorable, witty wife who is a Supreme Court justice in her spare time. Everywhere LeClerc goes there is a murder, in each and every one of the nineteen books in the series. The man is up to his elbows in gore and should be the first suspect in every investigation.
Andrew is a butler who spits in the soup before he serves it and who keeps S&M literature in the bottom drawer of his dresser. The laundrywoman has developed an interest in Andrew. But there is still plenty of resentment to go round, over something called a holographic will, just like Princess Leia talking to R2D2 in the Star Wars movies but concerning disputed inheritances. The will has disappeared.
Who the hell is Clarence? I check my list and realize I named him Carl by mistake. He collects knives and sneaks into the resort kitchen at night to pocket discarded lemon rinds from the kitchen compost.
The murder happens on page twenty-two. Someone named Felicity is stabbed in the back, with a knife, in the study — but no luck, Colonel Mustard is not in this book and cannot be the suspect. There are discarded lemon rinds stained with blood near her body. Were they put there before her death or after? I try to erase the line I made through Carl’s name but make the list indecipherable instead. I am on my own, just like Bernice, the second victim, in the cabin in the woods. Forty thousand words to go!
By page fifty-three Carl has an ironclad alibi. I cross him off the list again and tear a hole through the paper.
During the next chapter the entire cast of characters eyes one another suspiciously over roast beef and Yorkshire pudding in the grand dining room, watched over by taxidermied moose heads. Excellent descriptions of food! I make a snack.
An hour later, after a doze, I feed my list to the fire and open a nice, uncomplicated biography. Chapter Two in Volume 24 of Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson, in which the young Lyndon learns to fly a kite.