Love on the Rocks

by Sharon Kitchens

I decided to get down with Valentine’s Day this year in the form of the romantic mystery genre. Mary Stewart could give Ian Fleming a run for his money when it comes to glamourous locations and attractive twenty-something British female characters. Her stories are intelligent, but light, atmospheric, engaging, and a bit Hitchcockian.  

Grab the heart-shaped box of chocolates (particularly if it’s got some caramel filled candies), light a few candles, heck if it’s your thing plop a few long-stemmed red roses into a vase, dim the lights slightly, and who am I to say no to pink-and-red heart garland? You do you.  

Stewart’s greatest gift as a writer may be her ability to transport her readers to remote, rugged, romantic landscapes into elegant halls behind rusty gates and dark dusty passageways where roses hang festooning like cobwebs. It is into these settings that she drops her heroines who are at once independent and also a bit of the 1950’s stereotypical damsel in distress. They are all searching for something beyond the walls of their current situation. They all find mystery and romance.

Mary Florence Elinor Rainbow was born on Sept. 17, 1916, in Sunderland, England, a port city and shipbuilding center in Durham County on the northeastern coast. The oldest of three children of an Anglican clergyman, she began writing as a small child. 

She taught English at a local university until her husband, a fellow professor, suggested she try writing a novel. Stewart and her husband lived in the village of Loch Awe, on the west coast of Scotland. Her work was primarily published between 1956 and 1980 with her most commercially successful book Nine Coaches Waiting published in 1958.

Michelle sold me a paperback copy of Nine Coaches Waiting a couple years ago and that was it for me. Young Linda Martin with her brown hair and gray lonely eyes travels to a stately old chateau in the French Alps as an English governess to a nine-year-old boy. She drinks herbal liqueur, keeps secrets, deals with a seriously dysfunctional and manipulative family, also poison and blackmail and car accidents. There is Leon de Valmy, the master of the house, his younger brother Hippolyte, his son Raoul, and a kind Englishman. No character is that well developed. The focus is on the setting and the overall arc of the story. And, of course, the budding romance with a killer or not? Well, you’ll have to read the story and weave your way through the cast and all. 

I was attracted to these charming mysteries that weren’t all that complex or bloody. That provided a bookish escape to an isolated hotel on the Isle of Skye (Wildfire at Midnight), a brooding cluster of ancient buildings nestled deep in the wild upper reaches of the French Pyrenees (Thunder on the Right), and into the mountains and Adonis Valley in Mount Lebanon (The Gabriel Hounds). There would be a fire crackling, a bit of gin, and a balcony with mountain views. And just as you felt nice and safe and warm there’d be a scream followed by gasps and that horrifying moment when a man’s hulking figure threw a shadow on the wall and…hands clutched a throat and Oh my God, the murderer….

After Nine Coaches Waiting my favorite books by Mary Stewart are Rose Cottage and The Gabriel Hounds.

Rose Cottage – Set in an idyllic English village during the summer of 1947, a young war widow returns to her childhood home only to uncover a web of intrigue. Also, her elderly neighbors may be mischievous witches. There is a bit of family drama, truth finding, and romance. 

The Gabriel Hounds – The book is very loosely based on the accounts of the life of Lady Hester Stanhope (legendary figure known as the Queen of the Desert who lived during the late 1700s and early 1800s). The Gabriel Hounds are a pack of hounds that run with Death. When someone is going to die you hear them howling over the house at night.

An English girl in her 20s (nine times out of ten the protagonist is an English girl in her 20s) visits her cousin in Beirut. This cousin is the essence of charming. He’s an Oxford man who has been through North Africa. When our young protagonist meets up with him, he’s presently driving a white Porsche 911 and in the company of a friend’s father who is described as a bit of a V.I.P.  A bulk of the story takes place in a secluded and decaying palace (complete with a labyrinth) in which their eccentric great aunt (modeled after Stanhope) has ensconced herself. 

OXO