Murder in the Mill-Race

Copyright © 1952 by the Estate of E.C.R. Lorac
Introduction © Martin Edwards
Front cover image © NRM/Pictorial Collection/Science & Society Picture Library
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Originally published in 1952 by Collins, London.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lorac, E. C. R., author. | Edwards, Martin, author.
Title: Murder in the mill-race / E.C.R. Lorac ; with an introduction by Martin Edwards.
Description: First U. S. Edition. | Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks, Inc., 2019. | “Originally published in 1952 by Collins, London”--Title page verso.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019022890 | (trade paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Murder--Investigation--Fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PR6035.I9 M87 2019 | DDC 823/.914--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022890


Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Back Cover


Introduction
Murder in the Mill-Race (known as Speak Justly for the Dead in the U.S.) was first published in 1952. Like many of E.C.R. Lorac’s post-war novels, it is notable for a well-evoked setting in rural England—this time on Exmoor in Devon. Dr Raymond Ferens and his wife Anne relocate from a mining town in Staffordshire to Milham in the Moor. The move is prompted by Ferens’ poor health, together with a yearning for a different kind of life: he is still affected by two years spent as a Japanese prisoner of war, as well as by pressure of work in a busy urban G.P.’s practice. At Milham, an elderly doctor’s impending retirement offers the prospect of a geographically far-flung but sparsely populated practice which should not prove unduly taxing, and will enable the Ferens to “live the dream”.
This notion evidently appealed to the author, who had grown up in London, but always had a soft spot for Devon, where she spent many holidays. After the Second World War, she too had escaped to the country, moving to Lunesdale in the north west of England, which became an attractive setting for several of her mysteries. One suspects that Anne Ferens is speaking for her creator when she tells her husband: “I’m not being selfless in saying I want to live in the country. I’m sick to death of cities and soot and slums and factories and occupational diseases.” She tells him to “watch the emergence of a countrywoman. I shall be debating fat stock prices before the year’s out, and prodding pigs at the market.”
So the young married couple set off for their destination, a village on a hill-top lying close to both the moor and the sky. On the surface life there seems idyllic. As an estate manager called John Sanderson tells Anne: “Throughout the centuries, Milham in the Moor has been cut off from towns and society and affairs. Here it has…flourished because it has made itself into an integrated whole, in which everybody was interdependent… ‘Never make trouble in the village’ is an unspoken law, but it’s a binding law. You may know about your neighbours’ sins and shortcomings, but you must never name them aloud. It’d make trouble, and small societies want to avoid trouble.”
Another local, an old fellow by the name of Brown, also holds forth on the nature of life in such a community: “You try reforming a village and see how popular you are. Villages are all alike, made up of human beings who love and lie, who’re unselfish one minute and self-seeking the next, who’re faithful one day and fornicators the next. Human nature’s a mixed bag.” Raymond Ferens takes a similar view, and again one suspects that he is speaking for Lorac: “Whenever you get a group of people living together…you find the mixed characteristics of humanity—envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness mingled with neighbourliness and unselfishness and honest-to-God goodness.”
Sanderson also talks about a formidable woman called Sister Monica, who is in charge of a children’s home known as Gramarye. She is regarded by some villagers as saintly, yet Sanderson takes a very different view: “she’s dangerous, in the same way that a virus or blood poisoning can be dangerous… She is one of those people who can not only lie plausibly and with conviction, but she can tell a lie to your face without batting an eyelid, knowing that you know it’s a lie.” Most menacingly of all, Sister Monica “knows everything about everybody”.
Anne takes an instinctive dislike to Sister Monica, whom she describes as “plain wicked”, and soon learns that the old woman is making trouble for her. Seasoned readers of detective fiction will not, therefore, be entirely surprised when Sister Monica meets an untimely end, drowned in the mill-race. It’s another case for Chief Inspector Macdonald, who needs to overcome the villagers’ hostility towards inquisitive outsiders in order to make sense of the mystery of her murder.
The pen-name E.C.R. Lorac concealed the identity of Carol Rivett, or more precisely Edith Caroline Rivett (1894–1958). She was not regarded as one of the Queens of Crime who flourished during the “Golden Age of murder” between the world wars, but nevertheless she enjoyed a career as a detective novelist over a span of more than a quarter of a century. The pleasantly persistent Macdonald first appeared in The Murder on the Burrows (1931) and solved crimes in all the books which came out under the Lorac name until the posthumously published Death of a Lady Killer (1959). As Carol Carnac, the author also created a second long-running series cop called Julian Rivers.
Sister Monica is far