Murder's a Swine

September 15, 2021
Nestled beneath the playful title and byline, a pseudonym for then-married Gordon Neil Stewart and Pamela Hansford Johnson, is an equally madcap case of murder during the London "sitzkrieg" originally published in 1943. Featherstone Mews air warden Clem Poplett and Stewarts Court resident Agnes Clunkershill Kinghof, nee Sidebotham, find the first victim buried among the sandbags inside the No. 2 shelter for Stewarts Court. Agnes' neighbor Adelaide Foster Sibley, who's already been properly spooked by the vision of a blue pig's head outside her window, tearfully identifies the dead man as Reginald Coppenstall, the brother she hasn't seen in nearly 30 years, and the most likely killer as Reg's son, actor Maclagan Steer, who's the heir of her significant family estate. The only problem is that the other neighbors who had access to the shelter--deaf, retired French cafe owner Jeanne-Louise Charnet, government bureaucrat George Warrender, medical student Felix Lang, Mrs. Sibley's flatmate Phyllada Rowse, aka Phyllada Rounders, the creator of deathless young fictional heroine Fernia Prideaux, and Agnes' husband, Capt. Andrew Kinghof--don't include Steer. The campaign of improbable terror launched by someone calling himself "THE PIG-STICKER" continues until Mrs. Sibley is dead and her will reveals that she hasn't left a penny to Steer after all. The bigwig Scotland Yard sends to investigate turns out to be Agnes' cousin Lord Herbert Whitestone, better known as Pig, and it's no surprise when Agnes and Andrew run sleuthing rings around him, though their detection is upstaged by several broadly comic set pieces: a Punch and Judy show, a production by the Milmanscroft Guides, and a meeting of the Free British Mussolites. Zany period antics for those who've had enough of the present day.

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October 11, 2021
Gordon Neil Stewart (1912–1999) and Pamela Hansford Johnson (1912–1981) make good use of their experiences as WWII air raid wardens in this light whodunit written under the Lombard pseudonym, first published in 1943. To escape the rain, Clem Poplett, an unprepossessing London junior warden with “the face of an adored pet rabbit,” pops into a shelter, where he and Agnes Kinghof, a resident of the building above the shelter, notice a stench emanating from a sandbag. It proves to contain a body “with a long dead face, phosphorescent, greenish-brown in the torch light, hideously blotched.” The corpse is eventually identified as Reg Coppenstall, the brother of another building resident, Adelaide Sibley, who’d not seen Reg in 30 years. Agnes and her husband, a Royal Artillery captain, investigate. The puzzle deepens after Adelaide is frightened by a blue pig’s head that appears outside her window, and she receives an ominous note: “Greasy fellow aren’t I? The Pig-Sticker.” The Kinghofs’ banter and humor will remind many of Nick and Nora Charles. This exemplifies the raison d’être of the British Library Crime Classics series.

November 1, 2021
We're getting more proof that England between the wars was packed with witty lushes eager to solve crimes and good at it. Here are two more, married amateur sleuths Andrew and Agnes Kinghof, who go about their day in the shadow of Nick and Nora, chatting ""over the rim of a Manhattan"" and blaming themselves for the murder that occurs while they're off hunting Irish whiskey. Their era is the ""Phoney War,"" at the beginning of WWII, when Britain and France declared war on Germany but little happened. A body stuffed behind sandbags in a shelter gets them going, and a series of glib, well-written interviews around town reveals the corpse's connection to a neighbor, who becomes the object of the pig-ugly prank hinted in the title as well as a casualty of the whiskey search. More murder, but that doesn't stomp on what one copper calls the couple's ""urge for interference,"" and somehow the air of a lighthearted romp is maintained. The whole enterprise is a bit unbelievable but makes a perfect fit while you're sitting about waiting for the war to start.

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