Once upon a time there were three Herriard brothers. Nathaniel stayed at home accumulating money and choler. William got married, died and left two children and a widow. Joseph ran away from a lawyer's office to have a theatrical career, marrying Maud from the chorus on the way. Two years before the story opens, Joseph and Maud return from overseas and move in to Lexham Manor to sponge off the irritable Nathaniel.
Now it's Christmas, and Joe is annoying everyone except the imperturbable Maud as he bustles around cheerfully arranging decorations and putting up holly. He has insisted on a proper family Christmas and invited William's two children Stephen and Paula, with their current romantic interests Valerie Dean and Willoughby Roydon; Mathilda Clare, a cousin, is also present, with Nathaniel's business partner Edgar Mottisfont. So when Nathaniel is found dead in his locked study there are plenty of suspects to choose from.
Heyer's main gift is depicting the barbed interactions between the prickly Herriards and their soapy Uncle Joe. The book is a long one - 320 pages, with the murder only appearing on page 73 - but the whole thing is mixed and balanced extremely well. There are some nice moments of humour, some of which also provide neat clues.
The detection begins on Christmas Eve, with the arrival of a local uniformed Inspector, and continues with the arrival of Inspector Hemingway from Scotland Yard. Hemingway is just fallible enough to be human, without distracting attention away from the detection. By the time we've gone through it all three times - once in real time and twice via interrogations - we are thoroughly familiar with the locked-room problem. Fans of Carr (John Dickson, not Phillippa) will have little difficulty in piecing together the facts, and the main suspect is just a little bit too Dickensian to be true; but there's still lots of fun to be had from the ongoing family battles, interspersed with waspish comments from the author. A hint of Heyer's interest in the field of historical romance can be inferred from what might be called The Clue of the Vanishing Empress.
Not quite first-rate -- Heyer is trying a little too hard to out-Christie Christie -- but a very good B+.
Jon.
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