Miss Silver Intervenes

The residents of an apartment house in war-torn London are a curious mix. Some are blackmail victims, at least one is a blackmailer, and one is almost certainly a murderer. It's up to Miss Silver — and yes, the competent police inspector and sergeant assigned to the case — to figure out who is doing what to whom and why.

This is the sixth Miss Silver mystery I've read, and the best one yet. It seemed to be the closest Wentworth has come in this series to a true mystery story, rather than a romance with some suspense/mystery elements tossed in on the side. There's no shortage either of victims or likely suspects, and if it seems a tiny bit far-fetched that all these people would have washed up in the same building, I can overlook that show more because the plot and characters are so doggone good. show less

Real Rating: 3.75* of five, rounded up because Miss Silver

I wouldn't call this the foremost entry in the Miss Silver canon. It's perfectly fine. I wasn't irked by the sexism and the questionable lapses in fair play, but I was aware of them. Setting a frame of reference for old books...this one is 75 years old!...is de rigueur for modern readers. Patricia Wentworth began her writing career in the category-romance field, as we'd say today, so that attitude pervades her later, and far better, series-mystery output.

Still...Meade Underwood, the female romanticist, and her Giles are awkwardly dropped when Miss Silver begins her delvings into the lives of the twenty or so inhabitants of Vandeleur House. Their story would strain credulity show more outside a TV soap opera today, with its amnesia, its coincidences, its magic peen (it's an MM romance-fiction term, succinct, judgmental, and wonderfully apt, for Meeting Mr. Right and Melting Into His...Arms or, as I call it, lazy lazy lazy writing). It's a formula, an evergreen one, but really now Author Wentworth you are far too skilled a writer to resort to suchlike tomfoolery!

But this read is a decent one, the usual apposite descriptions and pithy aperçus abounding, and characters made so real you can see their shadows by your reading-light. For those reasons it's a worthy read. But the killer's identity is, in my never-humble opinion, a bit too left field for this to be an excellent mystery despite the denoument being damned near identical to the author's own notes. (I'm morally certain of this but cannot prove it.)

A pleasure read. A pleasure to read. Pleasurable reading. show less

Sept. 2019 reread via my dad's Kindle:
Even though I remembered enough of the plot to easily guess who the guilty person was, I still found this early entry in the Miss Silver series a lot of fun.

An early instalment in the series, Miss Silver is initially and tentatively called in on to consult on a case of blackmail, which quickly turns to murder. As always war is a significant character in the book, as the blackout and the hardships experienced by some of the characters play their part in the plot. A good, fast, read.

This is a better than average Miss Silver mystery with an interesting collection of characters.

It's 1941, the one of the residents of Vandeleur House is being blackmailed, and cannot quite make up their mind to employ Miss Silver, but when a murder occurs Miss Silver moves in to determine from the many suspects who the murderer is.
An enjoyable read and a decent mystery.

Fiction, Detective and mystery stories, Maud Silver series, a retired governess who becomes a private detective, First published by Bestseller Mystery, Mercury, New York, 1943, under the title: "Miss Silver deals with death"; First published by Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1944, under the title: "Miss Silver intervenes"; First Italian edition, Mondadori, Milano, 1985, under the title: "Quando il passato uccide". Patricia Wentworth (November 10, 1878 Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, India - January 28, 1961) was the pen name of, a British writer, Dora Amy Elles, Mrs. George Oliver Turnbull & Mrs. George Dillon