MISS SILVER

I’m heading into 2026 with my usual summer fare – crime novels. There’s something about a hot day and a murder…they just go together. A bit like a G&T.

I thought I’d do a little review of lesser known – today, at any rate – British female crime writers of the ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction. The ‘Queens of Crime’ are usually given as Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham. But there were other prolific and popular writers and one of them, Patricia Wentworth, had her own elderly spinster detective. Maud Silver is a creation to rival Miss Marple, and I’ve just read four of them.

The Grey Mask was the first Miss Silver book and a riot of pulp fiction crime cliches – but perhaps they were new at the time. The book certainly whipped along, with a long-suffering heroine (didn’t she know that no one likes a martyr?), a masked criminal mastermind, a brooding hero – jilted by the heroine – just returned from several years exploring jungles, deserts and assorted uncivilised places and a supporting cast of dodgy servants. There was an idiotic but gorgeous heiress, a Bertie Wooster-ish best friend and a series of coincidences, lucky escapes and (spoiler) a thrilling last-minute rescue. I guessed the identity of Grey Mask early on, but it didn’t spoil the fun of following the twists and turns. Then there was the cool and professional way Miss Silver unravelled the whole plot.

Maud Silver is an elderly maiden lady, with a deceptively mild manner. A good listener, kindly, sympathetic, deeply principled and religious, a lover of Tennyson and Victoriana – but she differs from Miss Marple in that she is no amateur. Miss Silver is a businesswoman who runs her own detective agency. It operates by word-of-mouth and among the aristocracy and genteel middle class, she’s legendary for getting people out of scrapes and retrieving stolen letters and jewellery.

I enjoyed all of the  Miss Silvers I read – Grey Mask (1928), Spotlight (1947), The Ivory Dagger (1950) and The Gazebo (1955) – for their intricate plots, claustrophobic atmosphere, mild romances and perhaps above all their vintage English-ness. ‘Cosies’, they’d be called today – but in the last of these, Wentworth’s depiction of a selfish, manipulative mother and put-upon daughter was almost painful. I suppose it almost goes without saying that the reader will encounter in passing the racism, xenophobia, snobbishness, narrow-mindedness, class prejudice and sexism of the era. Wentworth and Miss Silver enjoyed a long career; the last in the series was written in 1961.

Patricia Wentworth was the pen name of Dora Amy Elles (1878-1961). She was the daughter of an Indian army general, Sir Edmond Elles, and Lady Elles. She grew up in India and was then educated in England. Her first husband was also an Indian army officer; when he died suddenly in 1906, she returned to England with her daughter and two step-sons. She remarried (another military man) in 1920, and dictated all her novels to her second husband.

She had instant success as a writer, though not in the crime genre, with her first novel A Marriage Under the Terror, set during the French Revolution. She wrote 32 Miss Silver novels, and over 40 other books.