Sara Woods, Let’s Choose Executors

Sara Woods, Let’s Choose Executors
Avon reprint1986
© 1966 Sara Woods
(Out of print, as I think all her books are, but available from used booksellers)

This is the 10^th entry in the Atony Maitland series (I got a bit out of sequence here), and it is excellent.  The title, as usual, is from Shakespeare:

Let’s choose executors, and talk of wills”
Richard II, Act 3, Scene 2

It is (apparently) 1964 (we are given the date, Tuesday, January 28, as the heading for the first chapter), and Maitland is in the northern town of Chedcombe (an invented town) to defend the accused (but we learn nothing about that case).  He is prepared to leave the next morning.  But he is accosted by Vera Langhorne, a local barrister, who wants him to take over for her as the lead counsel in a murder case that is about to come to trial.  She has been retained (on her own) to defend Fran Gifford, who will come, to trial for the murder of her godmother, Alice Randall, by administering a dose of digitoxin in a nighttime concoction (heated rum and lemon).  The digitoxin had been distilled from the leaves of foxglove by one of Mrs. Randall’s grandsons (Mark Randall).

The murder occurred the night of New Year’s Eve.  Fran Rittter (who works in a solicitor’s office; the senior partner, Fred Byron, drew up Mrs. Randall’s will; the junior partner, Thomas Davenant, is Fran’s solicitor), and been planning to attend a dance that night with Mrs. Randall’s other two grandchildren (Hugo, the older brother who ran the Randall farm, and Marian—Mark’s twin, who has almost no role in the story).  However, when Mrs. Randall stopped in to see her solicitor—to sign a revision to her will, on December 31—she asked Fran to sit with her that evening.  Fran agreed, although it meant not attending the dance.  And she was alone in the house, except for the deaf cook.  And, in the course of the evening, Mrs. Randall showed her the vial with the poison in it, and told Fran where it came from, and how angry she was at Mark for making such a thing.

Fran’s barrister does not think Fran is a murderer, but feels out of her depth and asks for Maitland’s help.  Which he somewhat reluctantly agrees to give.  From there on, we follow Maitland’s investigation, which proceeds with difficulty.  Woods does an excellent job of portraying the town and its inhabitants, and especially the people involved, in one way or another, with Mrs. Randall’s life and family—and her death.  The courtroom scenes are well-handled, especially the climax, in which Maitland essentially pulls off a “Perry Mason.”

As this series has progressed, it has improved, not necessarily steadily, but the books grow in depth and in the illumination of the characters’ persons and personalities.   While we see very little of the two most important supporting characters (Maitland’s uncle, Nicholas Harding, who is also the head of the chambers with which Maitland is affiliated, and his wife Jenny), Vera Langhorne adds to the story in many ways (not least her unwillingness to begin a sentence the word “I”).  Maitland’s slow unraveling of the Randall family (and its secrets) and his compassion for people who deserve it make this the most emotionally satisfying to the books in the series that I have so far re-read.