This was a strange little entertainment!
I have enjoyed the espionage novels of E. Phillips Oppenheim such as The Last Train Out and The Great Impersonation but this had a very different tone ~ quite unlike anything I have read before. Over his career he has written over 135 novels and collections - Wikipedia lists this title as a short story collection, but with the book in my hand I can say for certain it is a novel that plays out continuously. It was written in 1940, the same year as The Last Train Out, making it one of the last titles he wrote at age 73.
David Garnet arrives on the French Riviera, looking to let a bungalow in Nice and is directed to the Grassleyes Manoir by an estate agent. The property around the grand home contains secluded bungalows with quaint names like The Three Cypresses and The Lamps Of Fire. When he is announced to the owner by the Burmese butler, he enters the room to find Lady Grassleyes sitting at a desk, apparently deceased. So begins an odd mystery as she is removed by the doctors who cannot decide on a manner of death. It's not a question of who-did-it, but the detectives and lawyers gather tenants of Grassleyes anyway and announce her will is to be opened in 30 days. Among the tenants are a famous opera singer and her love-sick sister, a recovering drug addict, a grouchy Englishman, and Jane the young niece of Lady Grassleyes. Quickly David and Jane form an alliance to figure out what happened, begin to fall in love, and are then shocked when Lady Grassleyes disappears from the clinic! It sounds more exciting than it is, as the group seem nonplussed and spend the next few weeks lunching and relaxing over cocktails. Indeed, she is not thought of too much! Complicating matters is the estate agent Spenser who is eager to sell the property out from under Jane, and the arrival of the Marquis and Marquise de Fallanges whose wealth and sophistication charm everyone (so why are they paranoid about the presence of Detective Inspector Suresne?). Near the end of the 30 days, things pick up as the Marquis holds a lavish party on his yacht, the likes of which Nice has never seen. Perhaps the will and family jewels will be stolen that night? Perhaps David and Jane will engage to marry? Perhaps the evil schemers will be dispatched? Perhaps Lady Grassleyes' body will turn up? Whatever happens, there will be cocktails served and shocking behaviour laughed off as so much delightful entertainment.
I would say it's a light mystery with few clues, some of them leading nowhere, some of them blatantly obvious. I had the impression it was a bit of fluff, but thinking back on it now, I rather like it. I found a hardcover copy (no dust jacket, a little foxing around the page edges) and being an Oppenheim fan, there was no question. I feel like I am rescuing them sometimes as these are the kind of books that are disappearing, perhaps not popular enough to be reprinted. Maybe not the best book I've read, but enjoyable and so interesting to read what high society was like in Nice in 1940. And he named the Marquise 'Victorine', which I thought very nice.
Several Oppeneheim books are available as free ebook downloads online, and if I have interested you in reading The Grassleyes Mystery it's free and right here for your enjoyment.
An entertaining little curio.
1940 / Hardcover / 337 pages
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