Leaves & Pages

Death in Cyprus by M.M. Kaye ~ 1956. This edition: Penguin, 1985. Paperback. ISBN: 0-14-006405-2. 271 pages.

Amanda Derington, left a war orphan in 1940, has just turned 21, and one of her first actions upon attaining this age of legal freedom is to broaden her personal horizons, for Amanda has been living under the iron rule of her prudish Uncle Oswin, a pompous misogynist with attitudes towards morals typical of the strictest Victorians, and young Amanda has had to adhere to a standard of behaviour long since discarded by her boarding school peers.

Amanda’s twenty-first birthday occurs while she is accompanying her uncle on a leisurely tour of the Derington family business empire in the Mediterranean, and Amanda’s decision to branch off on her own and visit the island of Cyprus has her uncle impotently fuming.

Despite Uncle Oswin’s tantrums,  off Amanda goes, all bright-eyed and open to whatever the world of adulthood has to offer. What immediately happens is that just before her ship reaches Cyprus, Amanda becomes involved in the sudden death – an apparent suicide – of a travelling companion.

But things don’t quite add up, and the odd behaviours of several other shipmates continue even after they all land at the destination and continue with their holidays, with the bereaved widower, Major Alistair Blaine, listlessly moping about and casting shadows on the holiday mood, a ghost at the feast, as it were.

Strangely ominous incidents begin to haunt Amanda, and she starts to wonder if perhaps Julia’s death wasn’t self-inflicted, and if, instead, Amanda were the target of an unknown killer. (Amanda and Julia had switched cabins on board ship; a key point which I didn’t mention.)

Much to-ing and fro-ing goes on, giving the author a chance to enlarge upon the scenic attractions of Cyprus and adding splashes of local colour. (In her author’s note Kaye speaks fondly of her own visits there in 1949, while her military husband was stationed in Egypt.)

I hate to say it, but Death in Cyprus, though readable enough in a mild sort of way, was a bit of a dud as both a thriller and a coming of age tale. The death plot, once revealed, was inanely bizarre versus anything approaching believable.

In the tradition of the most extravagant of the Agatha Christies, the mysterious killer strikes again and again, with various degrees of success, until finally (predictably!) unmasked by Amanda’s brand new (and not-what-he-seems-to-be) romantic interest.

M.M. (Mary Margaret) Kaye was an artist as well as a writer, and she enjoyed success as a writer and illustrator of children’s books and historical fiction – The Far Pavilions, 1978, was very much her star turn – as well as a number of mystery novels, mostly set in exotic locales.

I’d definitely heard of her before, for while used-book shopping for my bedridden, book-a-day reading mother in the last few years of her life, M.M. Kaye titles popped up again and again, and I have quite a little collection put away in the boxes of “Mom books” I haven’t quite yet been able to go through and sort into keeper and give-away piles.

Mom was restrained in her praise of the M.M. Kaye books, “readable but a bit boring” was her description when I asked her if this was a writer she was interested in going on with, and I must say that this novel was just that.

Will I read more M.M. Kaye? Maybe. It wasn’t a bad book. Just not nearly as good as it might have been.

I might give The Far Pavilions a go at some point. Or one of the other historical fictions. They’re not calling out to me in any urgent way, though, based on my reaction to Death in Cyprus.

My rating: 5/10. A keeper, but only just. Something to read when one doesn’t want to be deeply immersed in a book; rather put-down-able, in other words.

Final thought: Mary Stewart did this sort of thing so much better.