Death Among the Marshes:
A Murder Mystery Set in the Twenties
by Kathryn L Ramage, edited by Ginger Mayerson.
Storylandia, The Wapshott Journal of Fiction Issue 10,
The Wapshott Press, Summer 2013
The detective with a notebook is a commonplace in murder mysteries, and Death Among the Marshes pays homage to this trope, not once but twice – the investigating police detective brings one out, as does Billy Watkins, the manservant of the main protagonist Frederick Babington.
Set in the early twenties, this clever novella also gives specific mentions both to the Sherlock Holmes stories and to the first of the Poirot mysteries by Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). Located in the fictional Norfolk pile of Marsh Hall, seat of Viscount Marshbourne, by the village of Marshbanks, Death Among the Marshes is Kathryn Ramage’s way of having fun with the country house mystery genre while also acknowledging that living in the aftermath of the Great War was no less difficult for many returning soldiers than surviving the actual conflict.
As with the detective the reader may well resort to a notebook to make sense of the complicated relationships and possible motives of the actors in this story.
Continue reading “A tortured but decent sleuth”
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