Patricia Wentworth

Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver mysteries are pretty much a straight-up rip-off of Miss Marple. Sure, the characters' detecting methods are different--Miss Silver exploits her governessy authority over middle class characters where Miss Marple pretends to be flustered or befuddled to play up her apparent harmlessness--but they are both Victorian-style spinster lady detectives who knit as they detect, so there's a considerable overlap. (Dorothy Sayers's Miss Climpson, a secondary character in a few of the Peter Wimsey books, is another variation on the type; she's more emphatically Victorian than Miss Marple, and craftier than Miss Silver, and I don't recall many references, if any, to her knitting.)

Miss Marple's narratives sometimes strain credulity a wee bit--there seems to be a disproportionate amount of violent crime in her neck of the woods--but not to the extent that Wentworth's stories do. Christie wrote less than 15 books or story collections featuring Miss Marple, however, where Wentworth made use of Miss Silver more than 30 times, probably exhausting the possible uses of her spinster detective. (Christie was able to get way more mileage out of her eccentric Belgian former policeman, Hercule Poirot.) I think I've written this before, but Wentworth has to work awfully hard to insert Miss Silver into some plots; I suspect she's aware that few characters would cheerfully hire an elderly lady as a private detective, and so throws up her hands and resorts to something implausible just to get the story rolling. Hence, she half-heartedly has Miss Silver vacationing with her niece in the same town where an infamous crime takes place. Or happen to witness a faked shoplifting incident. Or be on the scene investigating a more minor crime before a murder takes place, rendering her available to "chaperone" ladies during their interrogation by official police. Pretty much all of her books also feature a young couple that can only be united by the successful resolution of the mystery; often, one half of the couple knows someone whose own happy marriage was enabled by Miss Silver solving an earlier crime in another book. Plus, Wentworth throws a couple of policemen with loads of social and professional connections into many of the stories, both of whom are always happy to have Miss Silver sort out their cases.

I've read a number of brief articles or blurbs suggesting that Miss Silver mysteries have been unjustly forgotten, but they really aren't as good as Christie's stories in the same vein. They're not only derivative, they're more obviously formulaic. I like them, but they're pretty fluffy.


The Wentworth books I own have pretty harmless cover designs--nothing as awful or just plain ugly as some of my mass-produced Christie paperbacks. This copy of Death At Deep End (a.k.a. Anna, Where Are You?), for example, features the worst of the covers I own. While the actual illustration is pretty stupid, it's not badly drawn, and it's not completely irrelevant to the book's content. The typeface of "Brilliant as Agatha Christie!" looks pretty low-rent, and its placement emphasizes the dead space on the cover all the more; if it weren't there, I feel like the cover would be about 10% better.

Yes, I did throw a completely random percentage into that last sentence, but otherwise, I think that the point stands: it's just not much of a design, and the type slapped across the top of the cover adds a touch of ineptness.




My copy of Wicked Uncle features a cover design that I've seen more often for Wentworth's books. Again, I think the design is neither terrible nor very good. I'm not crazy about all the white space inherent in this design, and find the really long quotation on this particular cover busy. But although I think the cover illustration is too cartoony for even a "cosy" murder mystery, at least I can understand the reasoning underlying that choice i.e. playing up the "cosy" angle. (After all, in a cosy mystery, the murder victim usually deserves his or her fate, so the death isn't really random or scary or a tragedy; if any murder can be called harmless, cosy murders are harmless.)

Still, this kind of cover seems...grandmotherly. Matronly? Spinsterish? I don't know. All it's missing is some kind of stylized feline nosing around the knitting in the logo. I'd kind of feel more embarrassed reading this publicly than I would reading a more luridly designed book.




I do quite like the recent cover series from Hodder's editions of Wentworth's books, with illustrations taken from advertisements circa the time period many of the books were originally published.

Sometimes the product advertised is obvious: 

And sometimes the product being advertised is... not so obvious:

Not all of the drawings are as good as these examples--I have one featuring a sketchy generic blonde standing in a featureless grey-white void--but I find the idea stylish and the uniformity of the covers pretty appealing:




Nice, right?