Faintley Speaking by Gladys Mitchell

Faintley Speaking is a 1954 novel, in the cozy mystery style, written by Gladys Mitchell, "whose famous novels, like good wine, need no bush" (Penguin Books).

There is a promising start where an impecunious writer is being thrown out of his room for lack of payment, into the London rain. Passing a telephone box as a trench-coated man exits, he is surprised to hear the phone ring!

"Faintley Speaking", the voice of Miss Faintley states, and proceeds to tell him of a package to be picked up from a store and delivered to the station. Despite his protestations, but with nothing else to do, he carries out the task. The shopkeeper gives him the package, but then denies it ever happened, and the station master who accepts it, then disappears!

13 year-old Mark is at loose ends at the holiday resort with his parents, and is forced to spend the day with his teacher Miss Faintley in the nearby town - where she disappears! Mark befriends young Laura on the beach and together they explore the sea cliffs and the abandoned house atop, where Laura discovers Miss Faintley face down in the garden, a Commando knife deftly thrust into her neck. We find that Miss Faintley was a Botany teacher at a nearby school and the house she was found outside of is empty, save a display case of fern specimens... and in the mysterious packages she was transporting were plaster casts of ferns...

Laura is travelling with elderly Mrs. Lestrange Bradley (elderly with a question mark to be sure, as in 1954 an unmarried woman, who is a psychiatrist and doctor to boot might be written off as a spinster quite over the hill at only 40). Mark and the pair form the unofficial core of the investigation, with the help of Detective-Inspectors Darling and Vardon quite on the sidelines. Laura goes undercover teaching at the school in Miss Faintley's place to find no one liked this inoffensive, unattractive school-marm, and there is revealed a web of gossip and teachers lounge politics which takes up a majority of the time.

This began with a lot of disparate characters and an engaging mystery, which by the halfway point devolved into too many diversions and side stories, with too many characters drifting away from the mystery. Gladys Mitchell obviously enjoys her quaint village characters and relationships, but seemed to forget that mystery needs momentum, and I felt the whole plot collapse upon itself. There is a final explanation involving forgery, ferns, and felony regarding Miss Faintley, but it was a little farfetched, and a little too late... despite the charm I found in the title.

Side note: this interesting word no longer in use: "perspicacity".

1954 / Paperback / 203 pages