Kicking the Habit

Earlier this year, I made my first acquaintance with Catherine Aird by reading His Burial Too. Although I expressed genuine enthusiasm for the locked-room situation and its resolution (which contains a very good trick at its core), I thought the book suffered from a poor sense of pacing, with a second act that dragged interminably on as the detectives investigated trails that were all-too-obviously dead ends. I had hopes that The Religious Body would be an improvement— the plot sounded like a riot and Aird showed an excellent sense of humour that could make such a story enjoyable. The result was not quite what I expected, though…

The Religious Body opens in the Convent of St. Anselm. One of the nuns, Sister Anne, is nowhere to be found, until somebody stumbles over her body at the foot of the cellar stairs. C. D. Sloan arrives with Constable Crosby in tow to investigate, and he decides that all this just doesn’t add up. Eventually, he decides Sister Anne was murdered, and begins to try finding the killer.

The Incident of the Pickled Herring

Catherine Aird is an author who intrigues me. Ever since browsing the excellent catalogue of The Rue Morgue Press, I’ve wanted to try her work. The Religious Body sounds like a riot— with a murder taking place in a convent and the nuns being forced to have contact with the outside world. All it sounds like it needs would be an elderly nun detective and a priest, both mystery enthusiasts, sitting down trying to figure everything out. Well, I might get to The Religious Body someday, but I decided instead to start off with His Burial Too.

It is an interesting book at first. It starts with a bizarre opening, as a fellow named Richard Mallory Tindall does not return home, worrying his daughter and the housekeeper. The police send out Inspector Sloan to investigate, against his will— he insists, after all, that it’s not a crime to not show up at home for the night. Sloan, much to his despair, is paired up with Constable Crosby, a fellow who gives you the feeling that the lights are on, but nobody’s home. The opening feels rather pointless, to be frank, but things get really interesting when the man’s car is discovered in the garage. Something must have happened to prevent him from entering his house! But what?