UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Elizabeth Ironside, Death in the Garden (1995; reprinted by Felony & Mayhem in 2005).

             In Elizabeth Ironside’s Death in the Garden, published in 1995 and reprinted in paperback in 2005, Diana Pollexfen’s husband George is killed on her thirtieth birthday in 1925. Diana is tried and acquitted for his murder.  Sixty-seven years later her grand-niece Helena, who knows her great-aunt only as Diana Fox, comes to the house of her great-aunt, who has just died, to arrange her funeral.  There, on Helena’s own thirtieth birthday, she discovers Diana’s diaries, and she sets out to discover who really did kill George Pollexfen.

            We have some of the ingredients of a typical English country house murder mystery at George and Diana’s weekend house party.  The guests include Pia, a painter who is Diana’s cousin, Pia’s husband the Russian émigré writer Arkadi Novikoff, a professor and the woman who loves him unrequitedly, George’s gold-digger cousin Fanny, and a suspicious Frenchman.  The cruel George Pollexfen, the character you’d most like to murder, is killed several chapters into the book.  But the detective in this mystery will not even be born for another thirty-seven years.

            The years of the first World War are important in the book as well, because during that time the house party principals either met, fell in love, went off to the war to be injured or killed, were exiled from their countries or willingly emigrated from them, or proved themselves brave or less than brave.  Until the 1992 detective, Diana Pollexfen Fox’s grand-niece Helena, can solve the mystery of George Pollexfen’s death in the garden in 1925, she has to learn the truth about the war years 1914 to 1918.

            Helena reads Diana’s diary, looks at the photographs Diana took during the years she was a professional photographer, reads letters from the principals, and finally interviews one of the people who was at the house party.

            The book’s most exceptional merit is that the 1925 story is made directly to affect Helena’s life and that of her friends and lover in 1992.  Every mystery story has two narratives: the story of the crime and the story of the detection, according to the classic analysis by Tzvetan Todorov in an essay called “The Typology of Detective Fiction.”  Ironside manages to link the two narratives so that they are equally rich and equally interesting to the reader.  Elizabeth Ironside, who is actually Lady Catherine Manning, the wife of the British ambassador to the United States from 2003 to 2007, is also a very good stylist.  I think you’ll like Death in the Garden.