The Energy of Language

[mtvessel]

Apr-May 2022
Behold, Here's Poison / The Toll-Gate - Georgette Heyer – House of Stratus, 2001 / Arrow Books, 2005
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Somehow, I have managed to reach my advanced age without having previously read a word of Georgette Heyer. This is odd because both my parents and my grandmother were enormous fans and we had around twenty of her novels sitting on a bookshelf in the house in which I grew up. At the time I probably thought of them as soppy Mills and Boon-style stuff that was not worth bothering with. Anyway, a friend kindly leant me these two as exemplars of the two genres in which she wrote; regency romance and golden-age detective fiction. Both books have a lively set of characters and perfectly adequately structured plots. But The Toll-Gate has an energy of language that easily elevates it above its rival.

Behold, Here's Poison ingeniously introduces us to the Matthews family through the descriptions of the shoes that they leave outside their bedroom doors for the servants to clean. They are in general a disagreeable bunch. Gregory Matthews is a stern pater familias who disapproves of his niece Stella's engagement to Deryck the handsome doctor and his nephew Guy's chosen trade of interior decoration. His sister Harriet is an elderly spinster with an obsession about waste and his brother's widow Zoe has a love of luxury and sponges off the family. When Gregory is found dead one morning, everyone assumes that he died of natural causes. But his sister, the formidable Mrs Lupton, is convinced that it is murder, and calls the police in.

It's a nice character piece, but compared to Heyer's golden age contemporaries, the plot is thin and lacks ingenuity. Clues were sparse and as far as I could tell there is no way for the reader to work out who the murderer is other than by eliminating the implausible characters. It is not helped by the fact that Heyer's recurring detective, Superintendant Hannasyde, lacks personality compared to the likes of Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple or Lord Peter Wimsey. His agency is also stolen both by his enthusiastic sidekick Inspector Davis and by Randall, the rakish charmer who stands to inherit Gregory's estate and who decides to investigate the case despite being an obvious suspect himself. Randall comes across as someone straight out of a regency novel and dominates the latter half of the story so much that it is fairly clear what Heyer would rather be writing.

The Toll-Gate starts with a complex family gathering not too dissimilar to the opening of Behold, Here's Poison, but here the aim is to give our adventure-loving hero, Captain John Staple, a motivation to get away. Escaping from his cousin's stultifying engagement party, he arrives on a rainy night at a toll gate where he meets a scared boy called Ben whose father, the toll gate keeper, has gone out and not returned. To reassure the lad, Staple decides to stay and man the gate himself, a decision that is reinforced when Nell Stornaway, the granddaughter of the local squire, passes through on her way to church. An attraction develops between them, but Nell is troubled by unwelcome visitors at home and John has to find out what happened to Ben's father.

There were a couple of things that surprised me about this book, the first of which was how blithely Heyer subverted the Jane Austen formula. There are no misunderstandings or hidden longing between the two leads; both express their feelings for one another almost immediately and the romance develops with almost indecent speed. The other was the variety and energy of the language. Heyer had clearly read many contemporary sources and her use of eighteenth century idiom and slang, whilst also retaining clarity of meaning for twentieth century readers, is an extraordinary achievement. It's lacking in diversity – all but two of the major characters are men – and it's a pity that Nell's agency largely disappears in the second half of the novel as she is confined to her home while John goes out and does exciting things, but otherwise this was a thoroughly enjoyable read and very far from a soppy romance. Heyer's detective fiction I can take or leave, but her historical works definitely bear further investigation.