Shelf Control #73: The Draycott Murder Mystery by Molly Thynne #TBR #GoldenAge #Mystery

Wednesday, the 15th of January–Shelf Control time once again! Shelf Control is a weekly feature hosted by Lisa at Bookshelf Fantasies, and celebrates the books waiting to be read on your TBR piles/mountains. To participate, all you do is pick a book from your TBR pile, and write a post about it. Link back to Lisa’s page, and do also leave your links in the comments below as I’d love to check out your picks!

After featuring a biography and an autobiography the first two weeks this year, in week 3, I’m back to a more usual suspect–a murder mystery, and of course, a Golden Age one. The Draycott Murder Mystery, published in 1928, is by Molly Thynne, an author I haven’t read before. I got this one again on kindle. The description is rather intriguing with some scary/creepy elements as well.

I quote it verbatim: ‘A howling gale … A lonely farmhouse … the tread of a mysterious stranger … and then the corpse of a beautiful blonde, seemingly stopped in the act of writing.‘ Sounds almost like the start of a mystery film, don’t you think? The case is being investigated by the local PC Gunnet, who naturally finds it a bit much. The farmer whose house the body is found in claims he has never set eyes on the woman before, but the police are not inclined to believe him for all the evidence is against him. And so he, John Leslie is tried and convicted. But then on the scene arrives an old ‘India hand’, Allen ‘Hatter’ Fayre, who finds that all is not as it seems in this case, and there is more than one suspect in the puzzle. The puzzle, it seems, ‘hing[es] enigmatically on the evidence of a fountain pen’.

The author: Born in 1881, Mary ‘Molly’ Thynne was a member of the aristocracy and grew up in Kensington. Betweem 1928 and 1933, she wrote six murder mysteries, three of which featured chess master and amateur sleuth, Dr Constantine.

As I said, I haven’t read this author before, but the description of the plot really intrigues me, from the scene in which the body is found, to the more typical aspect of the police jumping in on the most obvious suspect, and then of course the detective arriving to find that this was of course not the case. The hint pointing to the fountain pen also seems interesting–will I be able to pick up on it I wonder? Reviews of the book on goodreads are mixed (here) but many have said they did guess whodunit part of the way in. Still that doesn’t necessarily always spoils one’s enjoyment of the book (as I have been finding with many of the Angela Marchmont books I’ve been reading recently). So I am certainly looking forward to giving this one a try.

Have you read this one or any other books by this author? Which ones and how did you find them? Looking forward to your thoughts and recommendations!

Some reviews of the book by fellow bloggers are here (In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel who highly recommends it) and here (Beyond Eden Rock, who found, reading the book ‘left [her] eager to read the rest of Molly Thynne’s work’).