Mad Hatter's Holiday, by Peter Lovesey was the first to be translated in Italy: it was published strangely by Publishing House Sonzogno in 1975. I emphasize "strangely" because this book came out alone, among other examples of novels by forgotten or little-known authors, such as The Scorpio Letters, by Victor Canning . At the time, in 1975, none of Peter Lovesey's novels had been published so we must recognize that whoever discovered it in the distant 1975 had quite a flair.
Mad Hatter's Holiday is a delightful novel.
WARNING: SPOILERS!!!
The time is that of Queen Victoria. The first sixty pages flow placidly, even a little too much I would say, all focused on the holiday obsessions of Mr. Moscrop, a dealer in optical instruments, especially telescopes and binoculars, who spends his holidays observing people with his powerful binoculars. Not just any people, but the kind of holidaymakers who crowd Brighton beach in the summer: a humanity made up of ladies with umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun, gentlemen with bowler hats or straw hats, children, nannies, fishmongers (even those on the beach), holidaymakers attracted by the baths or the aquarium with the famous crocodiles, and as a corollary, soldiers, maids, prostitutes, customers. In short, a very vivid setting, even if sixty pages focused on Moscrop's obsessions would be a little too many. And I must say that those sixty pages are difficult to read, precisely because of the richness of the descriptions, but also because it is impossible to understand what these obsessions have to do with a detective novel. They would seem useless, if instead they were not crucial for the story that will unfold from that moment on.
Moscrop among the many people in the frame, has spotted a beautiful lady, Zena, with a very small child, Jason, accompanied by a fifteen-sixteen year old boy, Guy, her stepson, and the nanny, Bridget. The four are used to staying on the beach: the nanny should take care of little Jason, but instead she bathes with Guy, weaning him underwater with erotic practices; to the rescue of the noblewoman, who would do better to take care of the child before he runs the risk of falling and hurting himself, comes Moscrop himself, eager to make himself useful and at the same time eager to make friends with someone, since he is alone, in his world made of telescopes.
By striking up a conversation, he realizes that the woman is far from giving him a kick in the ass, something that any respectable woman would have reserved for a busybody, but is actually quite willing to establish a friendship with a stranger, given that she too is alone in her familiar world. It is not an affair that is born but a certain friendship, made up of walks and chats, and so the optician learns that the woman is married to Dr. Prothero, a doctor, and that Guy, her son, is there, in Brighton, for treatment and rest, in view of resuming his schooling at a private institute. She is the doctor's latest wife, who has changed a few. This strange behavior, and having discovered that the doctor is courting the beautiful red-headed daughter of Colonel Wittingham, a young girl, and that in order to have a better chance of meeting the young woman, with the excuse of treating his wife's alleged nervousness, he treats her by giving her a dose of sleeping pills, convinces Moscrop to be alert. And he asks the woman to give him a sample of the liquid that is being given to her in the evening, in order to have it analyzed.
The next day, when he is supposed to meet the woman to reveal whether it is poison or not, the nanny appears before him, who informs him of the latest movements of her master and the red-headed Wittingham, and also of his "courtships" of Mrs. Prothero. A servant who is certainly not only licentious, but also cunning.
It is the evening of the fireworks, offered to the citizens to celebrate the arrival in the city of an army regiment. Moscrop allegedly told the lady that the liquid was an extremely mild dose of chloral, a drug to put her to sleep and relax her.
A few days later, by chance, a visitor to the aquarium saw, beyond the glass of the crocodile cave, a female hand, cut off at the wrist. The existence of sand residues convinced the police to excavate the beach in order to find the missing parts of a female body to which the hand belonged, to finally find, wrapped in newspaper pages, the pieces of a female body, which however was missing the head and some other pieces.
The fact that they also found a sealskin jacket, owned by the victim, from which a popped button had been sewn back on, convinces Scotland Yard, where Sergeant Cribb and Agent Thackeray were sent to the scene following the initial investigations, that everything revolves around Dr. Prothero's family, and that the pieces of the woman found under 30 cm of sand did not belong to a prostitute chopped up with a cleaver, as the good young Guy suggests, but to a known person. It is Moscrop himself who remembers how a button had popped off the sealskin jacket during a walk with Mrs. Prothero, and since the police found a slip of paper with a receipt for chemical analysis of chloral in a sleeve of the jacket, it is clear that the body is that of Mrs. Prothero. The number one suspect becomes the husband, who however has an unassailable alibi, having spent the night of the crime with Miss Wittingham; and Guy himself, who revealed that he spent the night at his stepmother's house, has an alibi validated by Moscrop himself; the nanny would remain, who according to the woman's husband, would have accompanied his wife and Jason to the city, but she would have had no motive to kill the mistress; provided that it is not Moscrop, for an obscure interest. Moscrop would then pretend to help Scotland Yard. But... everything changes when Moscrop, having observed a suspicious behavior of Dr. Prothero, convinced that he is hiding something, follows him out of town, just to discover that he is meeting with a woman, his wife. Who then is not dead at all.
The doctor has with him a backpack that he passed to his wife and which is then confiscated by the police: it contains the clothes of... Bridget. She is the victim. Everything changes then!
Who is the murderer?
The great thing is that when Sergeant Cribb has framed him and is about to arrest him, the murderer will be killed in turn. And discovering the second murderer will be damned difficult and above all difficult to prove that it was murder, as it is disguised as an asthma attack.
THE END OF SPOILERS
A beautiful novel, let's say it right away. His descriptions of places, times and people belonging to distant times are fascinating. Lovesey has a characteristic, which is also peculiar to Doherty: when he inserts a story in a context different from the contemporary one, he has the particularity of making it familiar, so well described is this environment. And to remove that patina of old, he manages to temper the various atmospheres with a certain sacrilege, with jokes and a typically English spirit. If there are colonels and discipline, there will also be daughters who end up in bed with elderly gentlemen, wives who cheerfully cheat on their husbands and husbands who cheat on their wives, nannies and maids who instead of being with children, end up making them, accompanying themselves with stablemen and drivers. All this in a whirlwind of situations and events that fascinates and entertains. As mentioned, the first sixty-seventy pages are flat, and also difficult to read. You have to wait and be patient: after all, the style also respects the character or characters treated. The first part of the novel is in fact dominated by Moscrop who is an ordinary, precise, fussy guy, and therefore the narrative part dominated by him is also; when Cribb and Thackeray arrive, two lively and not at all ordinary types, whose manners also clearly contrast with convention (Cribb who slaughters doughnuts and who eats while he talks, as opposed for example to Dr. Prothero, the image of education and refinement), here begins the second part (there is no difference between parts in the novel, but between chapters, and yet the caesura between the first and the second is very strong and clear, precisely because the first part, which is also the one in which the crime is committed, is deliberately more leaden, while in the second, in which the crime has already been committed, we witness a relaxation of the atmosphere that sometimes becomes even laughable. For example when Cribb, in order to hook Prothero who is using a public sauna, grabs the former's bath towel, claiming it is his, and this only for the purpose of apologizing later and having the opportunity to offer him a lunch to apologize, so as to hook him and his son, and question them informally.
It will not escape anyone who wants to get the novel, how Moscrop imitates the attitude of the man in a wheelchair who scrutinizes his neighbors with binoculars, the protagonist of Cornell Woolrich's story, It Had to Be Murder, which was adapted into the famous film by Alfred Hitchcock, "Rear Window". The attitude of the two is very similar: there is the will to take possession of other people's reality, to insinuate oneself into everyday life through the binoculars, a sort of fetish, rather than peering through the keyhole. In Moscrop there is no voyeuristic pleasure of secretly watching a woman undress, but watching a woman with an interested but alert eye, commenting and reflecting on why someone framed by the binoculars behaves in one way rather than another. At a certain point one would expect him to be the one to discover the body; instead it is up to him to observe the amorous evolutions of a fifteen-year-old and a twenty-year-old nanny, in chaste early twentieth-century costumes, in the sea, and wonder what that child is doing there nearby. And then to insinuate himself into the story of a woman betrayed by her husband and put to sleep by him every night, in order to gain the time to lure and court another, so as to steal her friendship. He and the man in the wheelchair are lonely men, prisoners of a reality that has necessarily been accepted, but that in the moment in which it is observed is reflected in that of others. But they are also borrowed detectives: it is no coincidence that Moscrop is the amateur detective, borrowed, who dominates the first part of the novel with his observations; while in the second there are other professional detectives, Cribb above all, who will solve the matter.
Lovesey is careful with the pace, and the upheavals follow one another without stopping: when you expect something to be confirmed, a short time later a new detail shows it in a different light. And even the murder and murderer themselves become changing and fleeting realities.
Finally, all the examples on asthmatic diseases, on the remedies and on the various practices aimed at simulating their effects, leading to sudden death, are extremely precise.
A book that is a great pleasure to read.
And that in the last fifteen pages transforms from a classic Mystery into a very sustained Thriller, since first we must discover who the second murderer is and then how he can be nailed to his responsibilities, given that the cause of death is pollen, of which no trace was found, nor even signs of injections.
There is also a moment of nostalgia at the end of the novel, when Cribb goes to Moscrop's shop to say hello, and then we see the optician putting aside in a wooden box a beautiful brass telescope to send as a gift to Jason, Zena Prothero's little son, a sudden sun in the dull daily life of poor Moscrop who has not realized that the fact of addressing him of the Lady calling him "darling" was not a personal, exclusive sympathy, as he thought, but a very extroverted way of addressing anyone.
He who lives on hope will die in despair.
That's what I thought about Mr. Moscrop.
Pietro De Palma
