The Silent Pool by Patricia Wentworth

Usually I don't care that much about the state of the book I'm reading, only the words matter! As long as the pages are clean that is, underlining and notes in the margin are so annoying. They rarely underline or comment on the bits that strike me, and undoubtedly they don't have a mother-in-law who is a librarian. And other than giving me feelings of guilt if I so much as pencil my name in a book I'm loaning, she is a perfect mother-in-law I assure you.

But I did keep noticing this copy whenever I picked it up to read. I bought it cheap on eBay, and it smells very musty, even to my cold blocked nose. The carefully mended dust cover is very tatty and faded.

I still enjoyed the book though. I like Wentworth because of her characters, the way even minor characters seem such definite people who behave consistently, for example the vicar and his wife in this one. (The recurring characters however, the detective and the police, are not very interesting as characters at all, but usually only have a small part.) However in this book, the murderer and a murderee were definitely unbelievable as real people I thought. The love interest, where the girl worries he has a roving eye, was more interesting than usual as they were contrasted with another older couple where the bloke was a serial philanderer.

What I most like about Wentworth is the glimpse of a past mindset and society - the past is a different country, they thought differently then. This is often clearest for the recent past in those detective novels where they are trying to give you a sense of a whole group of people and the way they think as part of the essential clues for the reader. Not that I use them as clues, I am no good at picking who the murderer is, though my list of people who aren't the murderer is usually correct. A pretty short list in some cases.

The Silent Pool first published in 1954