The Stately Home Murder

'The Complete Steel' is a very lighthearted piece, almost cartoonish in its depiction of the English aristocracy. In terms of tone, the word 'droll' comes to mind. No grief, angst or terror here. Just a clever puzzle, and lots of dry, sardonic humour, mostly generated by the vast difference in the lives of aristocrats and just about everyone else.

The opening, which has a coach party visiting a reluctantly open-to-paying-peasants Stately Home, beautifully sets the stage for the gap between normality and life at a stately home. Having the coach party find the fresh corpse of a member of the household inside a suit of armour on display in the dungeon was a stroke of brilliance.

'The Complete Steel' is only 200 pages long and the case is show more solved within forty-eight hours which makes it a quick light read that I found very relaxing.

The plot has more twists than I expected and successfully mislead me about what was going on for most of the book and then delivered an ending that was both completely plausible and worthy of Scooby-Doo.

I think Catherine Aird's tongue was firmly in her cheek as she wrote this but she still delivered a good mystery. She also educated me on who churls are and what is kept in a muniments room. show less

The Stately Home Murder by Catherine Aird was a charming instalment in the Callashire Chronicles.

I liked it. I liked it a lot. The tone was the same as in The Religious Body – humourous and in the style of a Golden Age mystery (even though the setting is in the late 60s/early 70s), with the odd tip of a hat to actual Golden Age mysteries. In this one, someone leaves a body in the library and the Inspector draws the obvious parallels.

This is only my second book by the author but Aird will be an author I will read more by. The tone of narration is worth it. It is absolute comfort reading, even if the plots are not particularly twisted.

“Like Miss Mavis Palmer and her young man, Bernard, she came from Paradise Row, Luston. Any student show more of industrial philanthropy would immediately recognize this as a particularly grimy part of that particularly grimy town. By some Victorian quirk of self-righteousness the street names there varied in inverse proportion to their amenity.” show less

The Complete Steel is a cozy British mystery that was published in 1969. The book was originally published under the title, “The Stately Home Murder”. It opens with a young boy finding a dead body stuffed into a suit of armour in a stately home that is open to the public. Inspector Sloan and his assistant, the slightly bumbling Constable Crosby, are called to the scene and are expected to solve the case as quickly and as quietly as possible.

The police find that they have to deal with the resident Earl, his wife and a goodly number of family members as well as a full compliment of retainers. The dead man turns out to have been the librarian and archivist and the best way of finding his killer is to discover why this meek and mild show more librarian needed to be murdered. Along the way to finding the information that they need, another murder occurs but the police doggedly follow the clues and eventually arrive at the correct answer.

This was a fun read as the author played upon the humor of the situation. There aren’t any great surprises but the clues are laid out and are fairly easy for the reader to follow. The author’s dry wit and tongue-in-cheek delivery keep this old-fashioned mystery light and readable. show less

A relatively early Sloan and Crosby story - as usual, the characters that show up only for this story are oddly and vividly drawn. Sloan and Crosby aren't quite as cardboard as they get later, though Happy Harry and the rest of the police are. Good story with some interesting weird angles, but not worth rereading.

The beginning of this mystery is classic. A very rambunctious boy who came with his mom on a tour of Ornum House gets split from the group. The group goes down into the armoury, where there is a display of several suits of armor. The boy is there, playing around with the armor, and as he opens the visor on one of them, what's there to meet him but the face of a dead man. So...in comes Inspector Sloan, but solving the crime isn't going to be easy with a list of suspects and motives for the murder.

I'll rate this one as average; it's good, but there really wasn't a whole lot of room for the story to be more developed (imho). Recommended for those who like police procedurals and British mystery in general.

On a tour of a stately old home, a young boy's curiosity makes him examine a piece of armor. He gets a surprise when a body stares back at him. The body is that of Mr. Meredith who is in charge of the library and muniments room. Inspector Sloan investigates the death, focusing on the residents of the home. It's a pretty stereotypical British mystery but an enjoyable read.

Now that I've finished it, I think I've read it before. It was good. Fairly witty, kind of a tongue in cheek homage to traditional British mysteries.