I really rather enjoyed Faith Martin’s impossible crime novel The Castle Mystery (2019) when I read it back in 2019, so stumbling over a new hardback by her at my local library — and learning that Murder by Candlelight (2024) features a murdered body discovered in a sealed room — was a very pleasant surprise.

This occasional blog undertaking, in which I read modern, supposed impossible crime novels on the pretence that I’m finding something the internet’s resident locked room expert TomCat might enjoy — we all know I’d read these books anyway, and TomCat’s tastes are so divergent from my own than a recommendation from me might as well be a warning sign urging a 20-metre no-go zone around a particular book — has brought the full gamut of experiences into my orbit. From time-travelling SF crossovers to books which offer not a single impossible crime, from inventive and creative takes on my most beloved of subgenres to the sort of hokey nonsense that raises so many questions about how it got published, this has rarely been dull.

Having scored something of an unlikely hit with this travel book A Gentleman’s Guide to Ghost-Hunting, Arbuthnot ‘Arbie’ Swift is something of a celebrity in his small Cotswolds village. And so, when formidable local spinster Amy Phelps asks for Arbie’s help in laying the ghost of an ancestor who she believes is haunting her with malicious intentions, Arbie agrees to help without really considering the matter a serious one. Things take a very serious turn, however, when Amy Phelps is discovered dead one morning after Arbie and vicar’s daughter Valentina Coulton-James had stayed in her house on ghost watch. And not just dead, but dead in a locked and sealed room…though, of course, she may have simply expired from natural causes.

He wondered, abruptly, why he was thinking of an intruder. An older woman, one who’d been under some stress and strain lately, had died in her bed. The door was locked from the inside. The windows the same. The only other means of entry was a skylight in a roof that would have been useless even to Raffles, that famous cat-burglar and jewel thief. Surely Miss Phelps had simply died in her sleep, and most likely from heart failure, as the housekeeper had said.

That, though, wouldn’t make much of a plot, would it? So murder it is, and on we go.

There’s little in the way of narrative surprise here — the setup lacking, say, the distinctive voice of James Scott Byrnside or the clever convolutions of Tom Mead — and the set of suspects fall rather more into the cosy mould than I generally go for. This is very much the style of book oft-described as ‘frothy’ — our two amateur sleuths attracted to each other while not acknowledging it, and everything else really being just a backdrop against which they bicker and continue to repress their feelings — and I don’t really go in for frothy books, since at least half of what’s on the page can ignored.

That said, I imagine this is an excellent example of that style of book. The suspects make an agreeably motley crew, and Martin does a good line in the obvious candidate not possibly being the one behind it all…or, hey, maybe they are and we’re supposed to think they’re not. A suitably entwined series of motive present themselves, too, and if our sleuths did a little more sleuthing I think I would have enjoyed this rather more — but, again, if you like this sort of detection, in which someone ‘realises’ something rather than puzzles it out, Martin has done a good job of catering to your whims. I’m not the target audience, I acknowledge that, and I don’t want to dissuade anyone who might find this appealing. If you like your mysteries on the light side, this is definitely for you.

The locked room murder is, at least, a genuine locked room murder. It’s not original, and the detection of the method occurs in a conversation had off-page, but thank the Lord that a novel from 2024 marketed as a locked room mystery isn’t indulging in that horrible modern fad of getting confused with a closed circle mystery (which, incidentally, every murder mystery should be — if you’re teleporting in a guilty party in the last two chapters, you have written a poor, poor book indeed). My experience of Martin’s writing is that her previous swipe at the impossible crime was more successful, but then it must be very difficult to write as much as this woman has and keep hitting the high notes every single time.

Murder by Candlelight, then, is a swift, easy, and forgettable time that many readers will nonetheless enjoy for the couple of hours it occupies their attention. The inclusion of Arbie’s best-selling travel guide at the end is a nice touch, too, and adds a bit of verisimilitude, and more than a little humour, to this perfectly pleasant confection. If you’re looking for the best this subgenre has to offer in the modern age you can safely look elsewhere, but for a pleasing and high-spirited distraction from the rigours of everyday life you could do much worse.

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