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A review by expendablemudge
The Clock Strikes Twelve by Patricia Wentworth
4.0
Real Rating: 3.5* of five, rounded up because Miss Silver
Formula One: Hero and heroine kept apart by Forces
Formula Two: Murdered person has pots of money
Formula Three: Women Are Just As Good As Men (until they find The Man when they become soft, pliant cuddlebugs)
Formula Four: Servants know all. Fear them.
Mixed properly, a light froth of story cocktail goodness is now served. (I typoed "swerved" and had a long stare at it before changing it.) This outing is less frothy, fruity Mai Tai than Boilermaker made with Everclear.
Miss Silver appears at the 39% mark, hacking away in her usual chronic-bronchitis bark, to solve the family crime of grumpy old tyrant-with-a-heart-of-gold James Paradine's defenestration. (Close enough, go with it.) Family secrets, lies, and half-truths are revealed in all their ugly, warty glory.
The Women, now, the women are utterly uninspired and uninspiring. Controlling Old Maid, Fretful Mother, Domineering Spinster, Breathless Insipid Heroine, and Plucky Babe are joined by a small assortment of Servants, loyal but uneducated and, to a woman, unattractive.
The Men are, this being World War II, Doing Their Bit as wealthy industrialists. But they're still handsome and manly! The exception is the Club Bore, a *distant* cousin with body odor. Okay, Author Wentworth doesn't actually say that, but the implication is clear. Other than him, we have the Heir Apparent with girl trouble, the Oily Seducer without money, the Spiffy Stud whose marriage to Breathless Insipid Heroine is under serious siege, the Solid Brick whose Loaf of Happiness in Life is getting moldy with Fretful Mother's eternal dampening tears.
The Plans. They disappear, are noticed to be gone, reappear, and provide Author Wentworth the chance to garnish the plotroast with some wartime paranoia and xenophobic references to The Germ-ans. As it was mid-war when the book came out, I can understand the urgency to use these tropes since Author Wentworth would not be able to as soon as the war was over and no matter how it ended. I still wish they'd been more, I don't know, heartfelt? Organic to the story?
Because this story isn't a World War II story. It's the story of Phyllida Paradine Wray (B.I.H.), adopted daughter of Grace Paradine (C.O.M.). Grace is the sister of James, the murderee. Grace is the tragically unmarried and rigidly controlling universal confidante. Those two things don't make the third without serious alchemy. That alchemy is missing in this book. She's just a controlling old horror. Everyone says how much they rely on Grace, how her common sense and her insight help them through problems. But we never see this, never experience Grace in helper mode. Nor do we even get a clear sense of the conditions that would lead a person in trouble to summit Mount Bosom to seek the oracle.
So that central failing of character-building renders the rest of the plot flatter, rougher, and less cocktail than carbonated beverage. Then the B.I.H., Phyllida, whose act of rebellion in marrying the Spiffy Stud is frankly unbelievable given Grace the C.O.M.'s harridanity, has no reality—she exists to be the stakes in a frankly distasteful and overheated game played, apparently, over her head. She's just, well, insipid and not a little masochistic.
It is the Dom/sub nature of the relationships in this book that provide the depth charge. It's flavorless as Everclear, since it's uninflected and nuanceless, but like Everclear it's pervasive and powerfully mind altering. Our carbonated beverage was already a disappointment. We were promised a Mai Tai when we got sold a Miss Silver mystery. But then we got (in effect) a good beer spoiled: A bunch of nasty abusers masquerading as Doms, a story of surpassing sordidness with no one to invest in. That makes the resolution of the story, while clearly arrived at by traveling through the plot, unsatisfying.
But the saving grace, for me, why I got as high as three and a half stars, was the grace notes that make Miss Silver's world: Her aesthetic of bog-oak brooches and beaded kid slippers, the country-house splendor that Author Wentworth clearly sees vanishing before her eyes, the frustrations of wartime rationing that are organic to the milieu presented without fuss but with reason.
This isn't top-drawer Miss Silver but it's still Miss Silver and thus possesses certain charms. By the end of the story I was ready for it to be over, but I wasn't ever bored. That counts for a lot.
Formula One: Hero and heroine kept apart by Forces
Formula Two: Murdered person has pots of money
Formula Three: Women Are Just As Good As Men (until they find The Man when they become soft, pliant cuddlebugs)
Formula Four: Servants know all. Fear them.
Mixed properly, a light froth of story cocktail goodness is now served. (I typoed "swerved" and had a long stare at it before changing it.) This outing is less frothy, fruity Mai Tai than Boilermaker made with Everclear.
Miss Silver appears at the 39% mark, hacking away in her usual chronic-bronchitis bark, to solve the family crime of grumpy old tyrant-with-a-heart-of-gold James Paradine's defenestration. (Close enough, go with it.) Family secrets, lies, and half-truths are revealed in all their ugly, warty glory.
The Women, now, the women are utterly uninspired and uninspiring. Controlling Old Maid, Fretful Mother, Domineering Spinster, Breathless Insipid Heroine, and Plucky Babe are joined by a small assortment of Servants, loyal but uneducated and, to a woman, unattractive.
The Men are, this being World War II, Doing Their Bit as wealthy industrialists. But they're still handsome and manly! The exception is the Club Bore, a *distant* cousin with body odor. Okay, Author Wentworth doesn't actually say that, but the implication is clear. Other than him, we have the Heir Apparent with girl trouble, the Oily Seducer without money, the Spiffy Stud whose marriage to Breathless Insipid Heroine is under serious siege, the Solid Brick whose Loaf of Happiness in Life is getting moldy with Fretful Mother's eternal dampening tears.
The Plans. They disappear, are noticed to be gone, reappear, and provide Author Wentworth the chance to garnish the plotroast with some wartime paranoia and xenophobic references to The Germ-ans. As it was mid-war when the book came out, I can understand the urgency to use these tropes since Author Wentworth would not be able to as soon as the war was over and no matter how it ended. I still wish they'd been more, I don't know, heartfelt? Organic to the story?
Because this story isn't a World War II story. It's the story of Phyllida Paradine Wray (B.I.H.), adopted daughter of Grace Paradine (C.O.M.). Grace is the sister of James, the murderee. Grace is the tragically unmarried and rigidly controlling universal confidante. Those two things don't make the third without serious alchemy. That alchemy is missing in this book. She's just a controlling old horror. Everyone says how much they rely on Grace, how her common sense and her insight help them through problems. But we never see this, never experience Grace in helper mode. Nor do we even get a clear sense of the conditions that would lead a person in trouble to summit Mount Bosom to seek the oracle.
My vision of Grace Paradine, a Helen Hokinson cartoon character/caricature referred to as "The Club Lady"
So that central failing of character-building renders the rest of the plot flatter, rougher, and less cocktail than carbonated beverage. Then the B.I.H., Phyllida, whose act of rebellion in marrying the Spiffy Stud is frankly unbelievable given Grace the C.O.M.'s harridanity, has no reality—she exists to be the stakes in a frankly distasteful and overheated game played, apparently, over her head. She's just, well, insipid and not a little masochistic.
It is the Dom/sub nature of the relationships in this book that provide the depth charge. It's flavorless as Everclear, since it's uninflected and nuanceless, but like Everclear it's pervasive and powerfully mind altering. Our carbonated beverage was already a disappointment. We were promised a Mai Tai when we got sold a Miss Silver mystery. But then we got (in effect) a good beer spoiled: A bunch of nasty abusers masquerading as Doms, a story of surpassing sordidness with no one to invest in. That makes the resolution of the story, while clearly arrived at by traveling through the plot, unsatisfying.
But the saving grace, for me, why I got as high as three and a half stars, was the grace notes that make Miss Silver's world: Her aesthetic of bog-oak brooches and beaded kid slippers, the country-house splendor that Author Wentworth clearly sees vanishing before her eyes, the frustrations of wartime rationing that are organic to the milieu presented without fuss but with reason.
Miss Silver's idea of loveliness
This isn't top-drawer Miss Silver but it's still Miss Silver and thus possesses certain charms. By the end of the story I was ready for it to be over, but I wasn't ever bored. That counts for a lot.