(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
Quirky crime all too often gets a bad rap from “serious” crime afficionados.
It’s often incorrectly viewed as Crime Lite, and while that might be the case with some of the less well-written members of the sub-genre, the reality is that masterfully written cosy crime, of which there is a considerable amount is every bit as robust as its darker, grittier counterparts.
Case, quite wonderfully, in point is The Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder by C. L Miller.
Yes, it has a delightfully fun and frothy title which hints at inherent playfulness and a playfully askew look at the world, all elements that form a part of this grippingly entertaining novel.
But while there is sparkling dialogue and witty characters such as the gloriously eccentric joyfest that is Aunt Carole who steals every scene she’s in, there’s also a fairly hefty emotional weight to proceedings with the protagonist, Freya Lockwood, having to contend with a verbally and emotionally abusive ex, a diminution of who she was over the years of her coercively controlled marriage which robbed her of youthful confidence and energy, and a sense that, in her mid-forties life might well have passed her by.
Any of those items of existential baggage alone would be enough for anyone to grapple with, not least while they are trying to solve someone’s murder, but Freya has them all and it means that all the mystery solving takes on a whole other edge.
I looked around to see Mr Sunglasses was fully focused on Carole at the pulpit. It was obvious that he found his target. It could only mean one thing: Arthur was right. We were being watched. But why?
Particularly when you consider that when Freya is summoned back home by her Aunt Carole, who raised her, to the English village she’s avoided for decades, she has to face the trauma of her sundered relationship with antiques dealer Arthur Crockleford, a mentor and employer to Freya in her younger years who meant the world to Freya until one error of judgement meant he didn’t.
Even worse? The reason Freya is urged to come home despite all her discomfort is that Arthur is found dead in his shop, and while the police think he just tripped and fell down the stairs, Aunt Carole suspects foul play and wants Freya to prove her suspicions have validity.
While Freya is not a detective or in law enforcement at all, she was once an antiques hunter, like Arthur, working to find and repatriate lost and stolen items and she has a gift for spotting things, key, important things that might other less details-oriented and intuitively-rich people.
Talented she may be, but she’s not the confidant woman she once was, buffeted to an almost existentially fatal degree by Arthur’s betrayal (or so she sees it anyway) and by her broken marriage to the still quite nasty James who remains a malevolent presence throughout, thankfully only via phone calls which usually arrive at the worst possible times, and so while Aunt Carole believes Freya still has the mystery solving goods, Freya isn’t so sure and this adds some real emotional weight to getting to the bottom of Arthur’s death.
(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
The fun part of The Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder is the vibrancy and warmth of the relationship between Freya and her robustly idiosyncratic aunt.
It’s their renewed closeness and camaraderie that adds real light and fun to some fairly serious goings-on in the novel which treats murder, quite fairly, as a very serious matter and which doesn’t for a second treat the crime element as even remotely light and frothy, especially given that Arthur and Carole were close friends and his death has left Carole reeling with the full force of unexpected grief.
Miller is impressive in all respects throughout The Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder but where she really excels, quite apart form keeping track of a multiplicity of clues and twists & turns with flawless elegance, is in how she balances the lighthearted and the serious, with each elements beautifully bolstering and richly informing the other.
That’s quite a narrative trick to pull off, with an ill-judged tilt with either way completely throwing off the tone and feel of the book, and Miller manages it with compellingly readable aplomb, serving up a novel that meets all of your dark and dastardly crime-solving needs while offering the cosiness of current close and even possibly future relationships.
It honestly has it all, and if you like your Agatha Christie served with a warm dose of family and relational richness and dialogues that sparkles, amuses and intrigues, then this is the book for you.
There was no more time for talking. Carole marched towards the manor, hoping Phil would follow and that if he did, it would mean he knew exactly where the vault was. If he didn’t, she would find Freya one way or another, even if she had to take on every last guest at Copthorn Manor herself — including Artur’s murderer.
The Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder is not a novel devoted to ludicrously high body counts.
What it does do is judiciously toss in twists and turns of the narrative at just the right moment, each of them perfectly placed and well-timed such that they actually matter and mean something and are not lost in a blizzard of frenetic postmodern storytelling.
This well-calculated and beautifully rendered storytelling restraint means that The Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder has the time to let us get to know the characters, and to appreciate that while there’s a lot going on, there’s a lot going on for a reason.
An emotionally, impactful and future altering reason.
It’s this ability to be both momentum full and emotionally contemplative that means while answers are forthcoming to the mystery, which rather happily takes places in a manor house as all good atmospheric mysteries must, you are also able to soak in what is happening to the characters and what each development might do and mean to them.
It’s a glorious mix of the pell-mell and the thoughtful and it works a treat, informing every delightfully penned word in a crime novel that might be cosier than most but which doesn’t pretend that that prevents everyone in the book, especially Freya, from being buffeted by a dark and dangerous world and the nefarious souls that inhabit it, and more specifically, an event-plagued storyline.
The Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder is a wonderful, robust and emotionally impactful piece of murder mystery writing that goes hard on two quite disparate elements but which brings them together quite marvelously, intriguing the mind, affecting the heart and making everything sing with the richness of connection and family and a wry sense of humour that helps Freya and Carole to survive it all.