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Having thoroughly enjoyed Thus Was Adonis Murdered, I sought out the next two in Caudwell's 'Hilary Tamar' series, and wasn't disappointed. Once again the junior tenants of 62 New Square (and Julia from 63) feed clues to the carefully androgynous Tamar so as to lead to a surprising but logical solution to a mystery in which they have become embroiled. In The Shortest Way to Hades, it is the question of who killed one of the subsidiary beneficiaries of a complex family trust, whilst in The Sirens Sang of Murder the trustees of a Channel Islands tax scheme are being progressively bumped off.
Of the first three books in the series, I'd say TSWtH has the best actual mystery, nicely combining aspects of the relevant area of chancery law with aspects of Tamar's own expertise as a historian. TSSoM perhaps suffers a little by putting the hitherto comic-relief character of Cantrip in the centre of the action, and one has to allow a little dramatic licence to forgive his ludicrously extravagant telexes back to 62 New Square from the midst of the action. Both will be enjoyed by fans of the first though, and Caudwell's prose is as fun as ever, as witness Julia's description of the effect upon the elegant and unflappable Selena of some rather special fudge served up at a party - well, orgy actually - to which the two female barristers have been lured and from which they are too polite to try to escape:
"You will be interested to hear, Hilary, that it had a most remarkable effect—even on Selena after a very modest quantity. She cast off all conventional restraints and devoted herself without shame to the pleasure of the moment. She took from her handbag a paperback edition of Pride and Prejudice and sat on the sofa reading it, declining all offers of conversation."
If there is something that did strike me about the books, it is how little the characters develop over the course of them. There is little sense of them maturing or even ageing, and I rather feel that Caudwell developed her setting and stuck with it, irregardless of the real passage of time. We know that TWAM is set in late 1977, and a reference to the Friday after Easter being the 27th of April puts TSSoM in 1984, despite it having been published in 1989. Even seven years seems far too long a span for the internal chronology of the books though; they all sit in an eternal present where Julia is in her mid-to-late twenties and Cantrip is blithely immune to the maturing effects of time. I've just ordered The Sybil in her Grave, the fourth and final in the series; published a decade after TSSoM, it will be interesting to see how it compares.
Of the first three books in the series, I'd say TSWtH has the best actual mystery, nicely combining aspects of the relevant area of chancery law with aspects of Tamar's own expertise as a historian. TSSoM perhaps suffers a little by putting the hitherto comic-relief character of Cantrip in the centre of the action, and one has to allow a little dramatic licence to forgive his ludicrously extravagant telexes back to 62 New Square from the midst of the action. Both will be enjoyed by fans of the first though, and Caudwell's prose is as fun as ever, as witness Julia's description of the effect upon the elegant and unflappable Selena of some rather special fudge served up at a party - well, orgy actually - to which the two female barristers have been lured and from which they are too polite to try to escape:
"You will be interested to hear, Hilary, that it had a most remarkable effect—even on Selena after a very modest quantity. She cast off all conventional restraints and devoted herself without shame to the pleasure of the moment. She took from her handbag a paperback edition of Pride and Prejudice and sat on the sofa reading it, declining all offers of conversation."
If there is something that did strike me about the books, it is how little the characters develop over the course of them. There is little sense of them maturing or even ageing, and I rather feel that Caudwell developed her setting and stuck with it, irregardless of the real passage of time. We know that TWAM is set in late 1977, and a reference to the Friday after Easter being the 27th of April puts TSSoM in 1984, despite it having been published in 1989. Even seven years seems far too long a span for the internal chronology of the books though; they all sit in an eternal present where Julia is in her mid-to-late twenties and Cantrip is blithely immune to the maturing effects of time. I've just ordered The Sybil in her Grave, the fourth and final in the series; published a decade after TSSoM, it will be interesting to see how it compares.
