An aristocratic family, a big house in which an aged relative resides, everyone converging for a party, said elderly relative being the victim of a crime, a precocious young girl keen to investigate, rumours of a family treasure hidden in the grounds…lordy, I hope I’m not reading The Swifts (2023) again.

In truth, Murder! By Narwhal! (2024) by Alex T. Smith — subtitled ‘A Grimacres Whodunnit!’ and doubtless the first in a planned series — has far more character than The Swifts, but they really do share a lot of DNA. Smith’s world feels like the sort of semi-anarchic milieu that Aardman would animate brilliantly: think the similarly double-exclamation-marked The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (2012) and you’re not far off. We’re not quite in Alasdair Beckett-King‘s world of whimsy, but there’s an equally eccentric and irreverent tone — cf. one character’s “face glowing red like a baboon’s bum” — which marks this out, commending it even though the mystery element somewhat underwhelms.

Grimacres, then, is the family pile of the Gristles, and the home of Ignatius Gristle, the 13th Baron Grimacre. When this miserly, obstreperous, cantankerous, and generally unpleasant patriarch invites his children back to Grimacres on the event of his 90th birthday, it is not for the — entirely unexpected — party, but rather to tell them that he is engaged to the 20-something Giovanna Bellissima and will be marrying her in the morning. Thus a new will is being beaten into shape, and Miss Bellissima will inherit everything in favour of Ignatius’ own family, about who he is, unsurprisingly, rather rude.

It will surprise no-one, then, that Ignatius is to be discovered murdered before the night is out, stabbed through the chest with the tusk of the stuffed narwhal which adorns his study wall — there’s a sort of taxidermist’s haven of deceased animals lingering about the place — the door to the study locked from the inside. The presence of retired policeman George Badger does nothing to quench the enthusiasm of youngest Gristle child Edna, who, having discovered the body, sets about tracking down the killer, finding the family treasure, and generally solving any and all problems that come her way in the meantime.

In the acknowledgements, Smith makes mention of his own grandfather, who seems to have encouraged young Alex’s creative processes by introducing him to the “mind-boggling world of whodunnits and Golden Age crime fiction”. As such, Smith wanted to write a book in the man’s memory that was “filled with all his favourite things — snow, roaring fires, mystery, murder, and silliness”. It’s a noble intention, and a lovely root for such a project to sprout from, and I feel a little bad criticising it because it’s great that he was able to write this to honour someone who clearly meant a great deal to him. But the truth is that, as a book in its own right, this has some flaws.

Firstly, it is waaaay too long. I’d estimate the book comes in about 65,000 words, and this is about 13,000 words too many: we’re a quarter of the way through, having been introduced to the main cast, the house, and the generally poisonous atmosphere of Grimacres under Ignatius’ reign, before anything actually happens. Some characters — Edna’s older sister Audrey, for one, and Dr. Lillian McDougal for a second — bring absolutely nothing to the narrative, and the repeated mentions of Edna’s tortoise Charles Darwin are superfluous to say the least. This is fat which could be easily trimmed, making the book sleeker and less tedious in its final stages when, for this reader, exhaustion at the telescoping of events had settled in quite significantly.

And this is doubly frustrating because I really like Edna as a narrator, her mixture of childish naïveté and bluntness…

[E]very time we see Uncle Roderick he has a different person on his arm, and they always, without fail, look exactly the same.

…judged beautifully throughout. I love that, when she makes a list of who was in the house at the time of the murder, she includes “SOME CHICKENS” and then discounts them as suspects because they were “Sleeping (also, they are chickens)”. Via Edna, Smith writes some wonderful descriptions…

I skidded into the dining room and sure enough, my whole family were there around the table… I have to say, they were not a pretty sight. They had faces like chewed slippers.

…and even little touches which seemed a trifle false at first — she refers to her parents throughout as “Muv” and “Farv” — became more than a little charming quite quickly. And, hey, the chapters are short, and there’s a fun sprinkling of “exhibits” through the opening section which provide, via newspaper cuttings and photographs, some background which becomes important later. The book is fun in the way that these sorts of mysteries should be, is, I guess, what I’m saying, but in order to sustain that length it has to be either packed out with incident or slightly long-winded in dragging every development out past the point of tolerance…and, for me, Smith adopts the latter approach far too much.

There’s a convivial, fast-moving, witty, incident-packed story in the style of Beckett-King in here, but then opening needs to be cut down to less than half its length, the character who appears about two-thirds through needs excising, and, ideally, there should be more in the way of events that actually indicate the killer. Sure, I know we don’t want juvenile mysteries crammed with a hundred and sixty-seven pointers for younger readers to struggle to keep straight in their heads — leave that sort of thing to me — but there’s only one clue to the killer’s identity in these 400+ pages, and that’s not enough to sustain such a garrulous narrative.

And yet, Smith really does seem to want to write a Golden Age-inspired novel: there are all the hallmarks, including monograms, suspect interviews, a development that makes the detective see things anew…it’s an honest-to-goodness attempt to do the thing he set out to do — rather than someone simply claiming an affinity with, say, Agatha Christie and then demonstrating not a moment of comprehension regarding her work — and one that finds a believable way for its juvenile detective to be the one who comes up with the answers. I love how the era of this is slightly woolly, too, lending it an Olde Worlde air via an absence of technology yet able to retcon that in Book 2 if necessary by, say, simply telling us that Grimacres was too far out in the boondocks for anyone to bother taking their mobile. That would, honestly, work perfectly, and you’d get no complaints from me.

Murder! By Narwhal!, then, has much to recommend it — not least its gloomy, drafty setting, which is well-maintained throughout, and the cast of suspicious Types who are there to rattle around and look at each other questioningly. I do think, however, that any planned further entries in this series could do with a tighter editorial eye…but, equally, I’m not the target audience and am only drawn to this opinion by the promise I’d love to see expanded upon herein. A second entry is due out soon, and I can’t say I’ll definitely read it, but I am intrigued to see how the eye-patched Edna fares in further adventures and so might, if I’m on a particularly strong run of books, pick it up with slightly lowered expectations.

So, y’know it has that over The Swifts, at least…