The Murder Room

[sawyl]

Another day and another novel. This time it's P.D. James' The Murder Room, which has the distinction of being set in Hampstead, one of my old stamping grounds.

After a chance meeting with Conrad Ackroyd, Adam Dalgliesh finds himself touring the small, family run Dupayne museum and, at Ackroyd's insistence, visiting the murder room with its relics of grisly cases from the interwar years. Thus, when the burnt body of Dr Neville Dupayne is found in his car in a garage at the museum and the chance words of stranger leaving the scene mirror those of the murderer Alfred Arthur Rouse, Dalgliesh finds himself handily familiar with some of the background details.

Investigating the murder, Dalgliesh and his team — Kate Miskin, Piers Tarrant and new boy Francis Benton-Smith — quickly home in on the tensions behind the scenes at the museum. The three Dupayne siblings, Caroline, Neville and Marcus, seem to have been at odds over the future of the collection and the renewal of the rental contract for the buildings. Tally Clutton, the housekeeper, is concerned about the loss of her home; the ferociously efficient Muriel Godby fears the loss of the only job that has given her any sense of happiness; while the terminally ill curator, James Calder-Hale, worries that closure will divert his waning strength away from his thesis on the history of the inter-war years. Throw in a sullen garden boy, a difficult daughter, a mysterious motorist and someone with a rather too keen interest in some of the paintings, and the police find themselves with a substantial set of suspects.

The case is muddied still further when a second body is found in a position which mirrors yet another of the murders exhibited in the murder room. Could it be that the killer is a crazed outsider and not a member of the museum staff after all?

I rather enjoyed The Murder Room, but I think that I ultimately prefer some of the other mysteries in the series. I didn't buy into some of the characters — to disconnected from reality to believe that they really lived in modern London — I thought that the character of the museum was evoked rather well. I liked the contradiction of a museum that doesn't really want to welcome visitors — least of all hoi polloi — and doesn't see much reason to change. I also thought it provided an excellent setting for moments of real gothic horror, particularly towards the end, after the second murder has been discovered.