Review: "There Must Be Murder" by Margaret C. Sullivan
There Must Be Murder is available at Amazon.
Was it murder? Or the product of an overactive imagination? Did arsenic figure into this drama? Was the apothecary part of a conspiracy, or just a convenient instrument of someone else’s ambition? And while we ponder these uncertainties, will General Tilney’s infatuation with "The Merry Widow" lead to marriage? And if so, will one or perhaps even two murderesses then reside at Northanger Abbey?
Thus begins Margaret Sullivan’s absorbing sequel to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. There Must Be Murder is also a tribute to Anne Radcliffe, particularly The Mysteries of Udolpho. As I read the former, I was very sorry that I had not yet taken the time to read the latter, or any of the other Radcliffe novels, a deficiency that shall be rectified soon.
Thanks to a fortunate accident, I was able to read There Must Be Murder with that same author's The Jane Austen Handbook in hand. I ordered the Handbook as a gift for Laura, and for some reason (probably my own incompetence) she received two copies. When visiting her at Christmas, she generously gave me the extra copy, and it entertained me all the way home. I have admitted in previous reviews that when my contemporaries were reading Austen, I buried myself in science fiction, reading about societies on other planets and galaxies. I felt fortunate that I did not have to play the role of Stranger in a Strange Land while reading of the Regency period, thanks to the social protocols and conventions of the time that I learned about in Ms. Sullivan’s Handbook.
There Must Be Murder features Catherine’s triumphant return to Bath, adding some pleasant emotions to memories of her trip just a year previous. Now a bride of two months with Rev. Henry Tilney by her side, Catherine is ready to revel in the romantic triumphs of others, sincerely believing that those others are as earnest and deserving as herself.
Ms. Sullivan adds a lighthearted touch to the story by prominently featuring MacGuffin, the Tilney's affectionate and enormous Newfoundland dog, as well as Lady Josephine, a tabby cat belonging to Lady Beauclerk. Another delightful touch is the presentation throughout of exceptional drawings by Cassandra Chouinard. My favorite e-reader is an old Palm Treo 680 phone using MobiPocket. To be able to view drawings in that format at all is just short of miraculous. The drawings displayed well on this old clunker of an e-reader. To be sure, the drawings I saw on my Kindle were much superior since they were much larger and the Kindle better equipped to display them. Ms Chouinard is to be complimented for both her beautiful drawings and for the technical ability to capture them for different formats of ebooks.
Discussion
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Thanks for the review, Joyce! I'm glad you liked the story. The parts about Udolpho you really needed to know were copied into the story--I really just wanted to point out the silliness and over-the-topness of it, but I would never discourage you from reading it. 🙂
Agree that Cassi did a stupendous job on the drawings. She really caught the fun of the story. And she knows her Newfoundlands.
I'm glad you are enjoying the JA Handbook as well--I borrowed from it liberally while writing TMBM!
The pleasure is all mine, Mags. I enjoyed both TMBM and the Handbook, and was really happy I could read them together. Not only that, but your handbook served to enlighten me on topics germane to my ebook/pbook blog. Hope you'll visit the forum and take a look.
http://girlebooks.com/forum/general-chat/elegy-for-the-corner-bookstore/page-2/#p830
I found a piece of information that I was looking for in "The Jane Austen Handbook" and did not find, but which figures prominently in "There Must Be Murder." A certain beauty solution that Miss Beauclerk's admirer, the apothecary, provided upon request. Turns out the solution may contain arsenic. I wondered about this, but such a solution was not mentioned anywhere I could find in the Handbook (although this could just as easily have been from my own incompetence rather than an oversight by Ms. Sullivan.) At any rate, if the arsenic issue was indeed not present in the Handbook, Bill Bryson provided me with the answer in his "At Home: A Short History of Everyday Things." Here I quote from page 387 (yes, it is a rather long but fascinating book.)
"Toxic Potions were popular, too. Well into the nineteenth century, many women drank a concoction called Fowler's Solution, which was really just dilute arsenic, to improve their complexions."
Well...I don't know that any of the characters in Jane Austen's novels took arsenic to whiten their complexions, so I didn't think to put it in the Handbook! I don't think the use of beauty potions and lotions containing arsenic was confined to the Georgian/Regency periods, either. It's been a while since I did the research and my recall is imperfect.
I think I had in mind that Miss Beauclerk's potion was a topical solution, however. But of course if she, or her agent, poured it into Papa's gruel, it would serve as well as something one drank. THAT IS NOT TO IMPLY THAT SHE DID SO. Maybe she did. 🙂
I was also surprised to read that about Fowler's Solution as being taken internally. And I did infer from TMBM that the beauty solution was used as a topical. But my morbid fascination with the poison theme may have made me read more into TMBM than you meant to write. Anyway, this was my way of playing with it because the story was such great fun!