Tag Archives: Miss Silver

The Silent Pool by Patricia Wentworth

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The Silent Pool cover

The Silent Pool by Patricia Wentworth was first published in 1956 and it’s one of the many books which Peggy brought me from the US.
It’s a Miss Silver mystery and of course she’s never far from her knitting needles and wool. In fact I’ve come to realise that Miss Silver’s knitting fulfills the same function as Mr Harding’s cello in Trollope’s Barchester books, it’s a way of relaxing and de-stressing, an aid to concentrating on a problem.

Miss Silver is visited by a retired actress Adriana Ford, she suspects that someone in her household is trying to murder her. Adriana suffers from ill health and she has several members of her extended family living with her. They all rely on Adriana for a roof over their head, she’s financing all of them and they know that she has left them money in her will. It seems that one or more of them want to get their hands on the money sooner rather than later.

This was an enjoyable mystery and I didn’t guess who the culprit was. There are a fair few ghastly characters in the book, which can sometimes be a problem for me as I have no real wish to spend my time with people I really don’t like. It was saved by a couple of really likeable characters though. I’ll be reading more by Patricia Wentworth in the future.

The Girl in the Cellar by Patricia Wentworth

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Patricia Wentworth began her Miss Silver series in 1928 and she wrote the final one The Girl in the Cellar in 1961 which was the last book which she wrote. As Wentworth was born way back in 1878 I calculate that she was 83 when she wrote the book, which probably accounts for it not being quite up to the standard of some of her earlier books.

Having said that I did still enjoy it. It begins with a young woman recovering consciousness on stone steps, she has no idea how she got there and is horrified to discover a dead body at the bottom of the stairs in what turns out to be a house cellar. She has no idea how she got there and doesn’t even know who she is, she has forgotten everything and her only clues to her life are in a handbag which she finds on the cellar steps.

Bewildered and shocked she makes her way out of the house and gets on a bus where she is noticed by Miss Silver who takes her for a nice cup of tea of course.

Miss Silver doesn’t appear all that much in the book, but she is still knitting, a pink shawl to begin with and at the end she is on to a football jersey. There are crazy coincidences but it’s still readable.

What struck me though was the difference between modern crime writers and the ones from the past. Ian Rankin set out to write a Rebus book every year and Rebus aged chronolgically as a real person would have. But the old writers tended to ignore such things, Miss Silver started off as an elderly retired governess in 1928 and by the time Wentworth was writing the last book in 1961 Miss Silver would have had to have been over 100, but she seemed always to be stuck at the same age. I suppose Wentworth must just have decided to write her that way, thinking about it though – Margery Allingham chose to begin with a young and seemingly wet behind the ears Campion and aged him into a more interesting maturity eventually. I think I prefer a character to develop over a series, but I don’t think Agatha Christie aged Miss Marple over the years, I suppose some characters are just best stuck in aspic.