Fear for Miss Betony by Dorothy Bowers ~ 1941. This edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1947. Hardcover. 310 pages.
The grand books just keep coming. What joy to discover yet another new-to-me writer, and to have another book-search rabbit trail beckoning!
This title was found at Neil Stad’s wonderful Nuggets Used Books in Chilliwack this past weekend, source of a respectable number of vintage treasures now gracing my crowded shelves.
This time round the writer is Dorothy Bowers, who wrote a meager five mystery novels between 1938 and 1947, of which this one, Fear for Miss Betony, is the fourth. Sadly this writer died of tuberculosis at a tragically young age, leaving who knows what books unwritten.
Retired governess Emma Betony, aged sixty-one, has come to the point of reluctantly seeking refuge in a Home for Decayed Gentlewomen, but instead accepts a surprise offer from an old pupil to take on a position as a part-time tutor at an evacuated girls’ school, as cover for a nebulous investigation into strange goings-on concerning a possible poisoning of one of two elderly ladies living amongst the school girls.
Something deadly is indeed happening, but the target might not be the obvious one…
Delightful character portrait of the extremely sharp and very likeable Miss Betony – shades of Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver and D.L. Sayers’ Miss Climpson. The mystery, on the other hand, seemed needlessly convoluted, incorporating as it does multiple packets of arsenic floating about, an unconcerned (!) doctor, a case of extremely coincidental hidden identity, an evil necromancer type, a rather strange pet shop, and a truly wicked conspiracy targetting our elderly virgin.
As a “fair play” mystery writer the author played just a tiny bit unfair, withholding a key detail of evidence, but all in all this was a very diverting example of Golden Age detection fiction. Two “real” detectives appear in the last few chapters, but Miss Betony does all the heavy lifting, or, rather, takes all the heavy hits.
Well written in general. I enjoyed this book.
My rating: 7.5/10
A short biography of Miss Bowers, courtesy of LibraryThing:
Dorothy Bowers was born in Herefordshire, England, the daughter of a bakery owner, and raised and educated just over the border in Monmouth, Wales. She attended the Monmouth School for Girls and went on to Oxford University, where she read modern history. She later said these years were among the happiest of her life, and she greatly missed the friends she made there.
After graduation, she returned to Monmouth to work as a history teacher, but finding full-time employment was difficult. She tutored private students and held a temporary position teaching history, English, and elocution at a school in Malvern.
She supplemented her income by compiling crossword puzzles for John O’London Weekly from 1936 to 1943 and for Country Life from 1940 to 1946. However, she had hopes of a literary career, and published her first detective novel, Postscript to Poison, in 1938. It received enthusiastic reviews and established her as among the best writers in the genre of literary thrillers.
Fear for Miss Betony (1941), now considered her masterpiece, was hailed by the Times of London as the best mystery of the year. After the outbreak of World War II, she moved to London and worked for the European News Service of the BBC. Her fifth and final book, The Bells at Old Bailey, was published in 1947.
Dorothy Bowers died at age 46 of tuberculosis the following year. She had just been inducted into the prestigious Detection Club, the society of Golden Age mystery writers that included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and G.K. Chesterton.
Leaves & Pages 