An April Shroud (1975)

1975 Collins blurb:

After seeing Inspector Pascoe safely married and letting fall a few ill-chosen words, the thoughts of Superintendent Andrew Dalziel turned mournfully to a spring holiday in the rain.

April showers are one thing, April torrents quite another, and Dalziel had gone no distance through the flat Lincolnshire countryside when his car stalled in a flood.  From this predicament he was rescued by a water-born cortège and a group of singularly cheerful mourners.  He accompanied them back to Lake House to dry out.

There he was intrigued to discover a half-built mediaeval banqueting hall, a septuagenarian poet, a hippie film-maker, a deep-frozen rat, a cook on the game, and other unusual items.  Puzzles like these were hard for a detective to ignore, but Dalziel found it even harder to ignore the mature but still potent charms of Bonnie Fielding, mistress of the house.  Regrettably, her two husbands had both died in unfortunate circumstances, so Dalziel had to tread carefully.  And by the time Pascoe returned from honeymoon and attended the first banquet in the medieval hall, there were two more corpses and it looked as if the fat superintendent might have finally got out of his depth.

My review:

An early and consistently entertaining Hill built along orthodox lines and comparable to vintage (i.e., with plot) Innes.  The story is seen almost entirely through the eyes of the fat and unpleasant Dalziel—and it’s not a pleasant sight (with gratuitous introspective depression).  Dalziel, holidaying in Lincolnshire, comes across an aquatic funeral and a dotty family intent on creating a restaurant but lacking in capital, most notably Mrs. Fielding, Dalziel’s lust interest.  The bizarre details of the plot (dead rats in freezers, anonymous telephone calls, the Gumbelow literary prize, and insurance fraud) all fit neatly together, and the ending is nicely ambiguous, if anti-climactic.

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