B. M. Gill

• Born: February 15, 1921
• Birthplace: Holyhead, North Wales, Great Britain
• Died: 1995

Types of Plot: Master sleuth; psychological

Principal Series: Tom Maybridge, 1980-

Contribution

Two of B. M. Gill’s mystery novels, Victims (1980) and Seminar for Murder (1985), are tightly written police procedurals with high puzzle value and fairly conventional “whodunit” plots. Death Drop (1979) and The Twelfth Juror (1984) are psychological portraits of victims, criminals, bereaved families, and innocent bystanders all trapped together by tragic events and emotional stresses beyond their control. The Fifth Rapunzel (1991) combines elements of both. Nursery Crimes (1986) is a sardonic analysis of a six-year-old murderess who wipes out pesky playmates and interfering adults with the cool aplomb of a baby Lizzie Borden.

Gill’s greatest contribution to the mystery genre lies in her ability to button herself (and her readers) into the skins of her characters. Their deeds and psyches are not merely described but rendered as well. Gill makes her readers feel each emotion—from humor to horror—and think each thought along with the character. Gill’s versatility in several genres and her emotional range are remarkable.

Biography

B. M. Gill was born Barbara Margaret Gill on February 15, 1921, the daughter of an Irish sea captain and his Welsh wife. Gill began writing at the age of eight, after her father encouraged the imaginative child to set down her stories about secret passages and mysterious doings. In accordance with her mixed parentage, the young Gill was educated at a convent school but attended a Presbyterian church on Sundays. This contradictory religious upbringing is reflected in Nursery Crimes, Gill’s most comical, most chilling, and best-written novel.

After leaving school at the age of fifteen, Gill worked in the Trinity House Office in Holyhead, “learning about buoys, lighthouses and Elder Brethren.” She worked there until her marriage at the age of twenty-one to a Mr. Trimble, whom she has not fully named or discussed in interviews. The marriage soon ended in divorce, leaving Barbara Margaret Trimble with a young son, Roger, to support. Casting about for a profession that would allow her to work at home, Gill trained as a chiropodist and set up a private practice for four years. She then retrained as a nursery school teacher and taught for fourteen years in a village school in Somerset.

While teaching, Gill began writing radio scripts and short stories for Chambers Journal and John O’London, two literary magazines. Using the pseudonym Margaret Blake, she also began writing romantic suspense novels that were serialized in Woman and Woman’s Own. Encouraged by the steady sale of her writing, Gill quit her teaching job, only to discover that because of rapid inflation she could not support herself by writing alone. She therefore returned to chiropody and worked in a public health clinic for six more years before retiring.

On retirement, Gill returned to her mother’s native Anglesby in Wales, resumed her maiden name, and began writing detective stories. Her first novel, Target Westminster (1977), deals with a plot to blow up the House of Parliament. Her second book, Death Drop, revolves around a grieving father’s attempt to discover the truth about his son’s “accidental” death at a school outing; this work was reprinted in the United States and was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award. Gill’s postretirement career as a mystery writer was well on its way. Her fourth book, The Twelfth Juror, won Great Britain’s top crime award, the Gold Dagger, as well as a second Edgar nomination in the United States.

Analysis

B. M. Gill’s three novels featuring Detective Chief Inspector Tom Maybridge are Victims (published in the United States as Suspect), Seminar for Murder, and The Fifth Rapunzel. The first two are tightly written, well-paced police procedurals with a conventionally crafted whodunit denouement. The Fifth Rapunzel, the third in the series, was less well received but still fit within any description of a Maybridge novel. Gill’s compassion for her characters, both innocent and guilty, and her insight into the emotional forces that drive them set her novels apart from typical police procedurals. The opening paragraph of Victims depicts the killer tenderly arranging Margaret McKendrick’s corpse in a halo of dandelion leaves and admiring his victim’s beauty and the glory of the clear August night. The book’s closing line, “Paul accepted,” depicts the victim’s father as he learns to live with his bereavement and to appreciate the innocent pleasure of a golden autumnal morning. Between these two passages, between the night of the killer and the dawn of restored order, Gill takes her readers into some very dark recesses of the human mind. Some of the kindest and gentlest of the characters prove to have twisted, cruel souls; some of the most loutish and brutal ones have tender, poetic hearts; some of the most noble and worthy ones die.

Gill’s technique is to move her narrative in and out of the minds and lives of the various characters. The reader develops his own sympathies and suspicions as the plot unfolds. The killer is cleverly disguised amid the other characters, and his thoughts and feelings are probed as deeply and clearly as anyone else’s. The reader learns to like him and identifies with his problems, so the final revelation produces not only pleasure but also an emotional pang.

Gill’s greatest skill as a writer lies in her ability to keep her own personality concealed. She unfolds the varying aspects of her characters through their own thoughts and inner soliloquies, without an intrusive author’s voice describing these people and directing the reader’s judgment. Nevertheless, despite the absence of overt authorial didacticism, a strong moral message about personal and civic responsibility emerges.

The character of Tom Maybridge is not employed as a mask for the author. He is merely one of several police officers conducting the investigation into the multiple murders that suddenly plague City Hospital and this nameless English town. Maybridge himself has only a surname in Victims and was probably not originally intended to be a series character. When he reappears in Seminar for Murder, however, he has acquired a first name, a scholarly wife, and a more fleshed-out personality.

Seminar for Murder

In Seminar for Murder, Maybridge accepts an invitation to lecture to a group of eminent mystery writers at the annual Golden Guillotine awards banquet. With his wife in America lecturing on Restoration prose, Maybridge feels compelled to demonstrate his own erudition in the field of police forensics. He is able to expose the methodological errors of virtually every member of the august literary assemblage. His pleasure in his own cleverness is considerably dampened, however, when the association’s president is found dead in bed, a skewer through his throat and a note taped to the headboard: Fault This Murder, Detective Chief Inspector Maybridge, If You Can.

Maybridge finds the murder hard to fault, indeed, as one suspect is found murdered and others provide unshakable alibis. He feels humiliated and also guilty, believing that his caustic demolition of the writers’ plots motivated Sir Godfrey Grant’s murder. Nevertheless, he struggles valiantly with the case. Despite his best efforts, his emotional involvement in the case clouds his judgment so thoroughly that he does not really solve it until several months after the official investigation has ended. Even then, it is the killer’s voluntary confession that forces Maybridge to acknowledge how far off the mark he has been.

Death Drop

Although the Maybridge novels are entertaining and far superior to most others of their genre, they are not Gill’s best efforts. Death Drop, The Twelfth Juror, and especially Nursery Crimes are rare treats for the reader. Filled with violence, passion, twisted love, and noble intentions gone awry, they haunt the mind like Freudian dream images.

Death Drop, Gill’s second novel and the first to be nominated for an Edgar Award, deals with a grieving father’s attempt to discover the truth about his twelve-year-old son’s death during a school outing. Young David Fleming has fallen down the hold of a ship at the Maritime Museum, and the headmaster and teaching staff of exclusive Marristone Grange all sympathize with John Fleming over the tragedy of his son’s accident. Their main concern is to avoid a lawsuit stemming from negligence charges.

Fleming does not believe that his son died accidentally, however, and proving the school’s negligence would be balm for his own guilty conscience. Fleming’s secret concern is that David may have committed suicide. Ruth Fleming, David’s mother, has recently died of cancer, and the child suffered a second bereavement when his father, preoccupied with his own grief and busy with his professional travels, placed him at Marristone Grange, a typical upper-class British boys’ school with all the usual hazing and casual brutality that young boys in packs can inflict on one another. Was David unhappy enough in that environment to kill himself?

Although John Fleming is the main character, he is not the ruling consciousness throughout the book. Again, Gill permits the reader to experience the doubt, guilt, sadness, joy, hope, pain, fear, and love felt by the various characters. All minds are probed; all thoughts and emotions are shared. Brannigan, the headmaster of Marristone Grange, is torn between his basic decency and love of truth and his need to protect the school. Jenny Renshaw, the young infirmary matron, and Thirza Crayshaw, Fleming’s sophisticated lawyer, try to maintain their professional objectivity while falling in love with the handsome, troubled widower. Fleming himself is torn between his desire to avenge his son’s death and his reluctant pity for David’s unhappy killer, whose identity becomes clear fairly early in the book. While the murderer’s identity is easy to guess, his motive remains obscure until the last few chapters. When it is finally revealed, the reader feels pain and pity for the sad, lost killer, whose special good and special curse has been his thwarted capacity to love.

The Twelfth Juror

The Twelfth Juror is another study in twisted love and noble intentions gone awry. Robert Quinn, a middle-aged dropout from journalism and upper-class respectability, welcomes Frances, the troubled daughter of a murder victim, into his home, which is shared by a genial crew of street singers. The girl’s father, television personality Edward Carne, is on trial for the murder of his wife. When Quinn finds himself selected as the twelfth juror at Edward Carne’s trial, however, he must choose between his sympathy for the pathetic young girl and his duty toward the law. He decides to remain on the jury and to win acquittal for Edward Carne, whose innocence he alternately believes in and doubts. Her father’s freedom will be Quinn’s gift to Frances, his way of curing her alcoholism and her troubled mind. Basking smugly in the nobility of his motives, he succumbs to hubris in believing that he is above the law and that his reasoning ability and judgment are stronger and truer than those of the other eleven jurors combined. As inexorably as fate in a Greek tragedy, Quinn’s well-intentioned arrogance leads to a bloody climax in which the guilty and innocent are destroyed together. Once again, Gill has presented a psychologically complex cast of characters who are motivated by misplaced love and frustration at their inability to find a gentler outlet for their passions.

Nursery Crimes

Nursery Crimes, Gill’s finest novel, is the lethally humorous tale of Zanny Moncrief, a cherubic six-year-old murderess who coolly and efficiently dispatches anyone who thwarts her desires. The story is set during the days of the London Blitz, and Zanny’s first victim is little Willie Morton, a slum evacuee whom she drowns when he teases her and tries to appropriate her toys. Clare and Graham Moncrief, Zanny’s parents, fight hard to stifle their growing certainty that their beloved child is a cold-blooded killer. Willie’s older sister, Dolly, has witnessed the murder, and Zanny must buy her silence with a toy perambulator. She intends to retrieve her treasure by shoving Dolly under a passing bread truck, but the wily slum child dodges at the last moment, and Evans, the kindly bread-truck driver, swerves into a wall and dies in a spectacularly flaming wreck.

The terrified Moncriefs, still determined to protect their erring child, send her and Dolly to the shelter of a convent school, in the hope that the restricted environment will limit Zanny’s scope for homicide. Several years pass, the convent’s population has not been decimated, and Zanny’s parents breathe easier—until the fifteen-year-old girl develops an adolescent passion for Murphy, the convent gardener, who is in love with Bridget O’Hare, a physical education teacher. Soon Bridget’s battered body is discovered at the foot of a rocky ocean cliff, and Murphy is convicted of her murder. In her attempt to clear Murphy’s name without implicating herself, Zanny disposes of a troublesome judge and several hapless nuns. She finally even tries to confess, but the authorities dismiss her story as the hysterical babbling of an infatuated child. Only Dolly and her parents know the truth about Zanny, and they cannot bring themselves to reveal their knowledge. Dolly’s silence is motivated by a healthy desire for self-preservation; the Moncriefs’ silence stems from their guilty love. Regardless of their motives, those closest to Zanny become her accomplices as the body count climbs ever higher.

Zanny is no inexplicable genetic monster. She is the logical product of wartime England, in which entire neighborhoods full of people vanish in a single moment of the Blitz. Graham Moncrief, Zanny’s father, is a bomber pilot who makes German neighborhoods disappear in the same way. He is rewarded and called a hero for his deeds. Observing the values of the adults around her, Zanny learns to take what she wants, when she wants it, by any means available. Her first year at the convent does instill an inchoate sense of guilt and responsibility in the still-malleable child, and on the occasion of her first confession she tries to tell the priest what she has done. The kindly Father Donovan is certain that the blonde angel before him has been reading too many nasty comics; he laughs and tells her to say three Hail Marys. Analyzing the priest’s reaction, the child quite logically concludes that her victims are now safe with Jesus, so murder cannot really be much of a sin at all. Thus shaped and encouraged by all the societal forces around her, Zanny is not a moral freak but a perfectly natural product of her upbringing. Gill’s genius lies in making the reader accept this grotesque conclusion with an amused chuckle.

Beneath the entertainment offered by her books, however, Gill presents the reader with several disquieting themes and moral lessons. Sexuality is a potentially dangerous force and should not be ignored or unnaturally suppressed. It must be channeled into a loving, committed relationship. Compassion and love, too, can be dangerous when they are carelessly bestowed on the wrong people at the wrong time. Gill’s presentation of these lessons is never didactic or obtrusive. She hides her authorial voice beneath her graceful prose and allows her characters and their deeds to speak for themselves.

Principal Series Characters:

• Detective Chief Inspector Tom Maybridge is married to Meg, an English expert in Restoration prose. They have one grown son, whose name is not given. Maybridge is described as “a benign-looking middle-aged man, short-legged and big-paunched . . . more impressive when seated.” He wears gold-rimmed glasses and has a steady, piercing gaze that he uses to unnerve suspects during interrogation. A gentle, caring man, he appears cold and impersonal, but in reality he gets too emotionally involved in his cases and sometimes permits his feelings to cloud his judgment.

Bibliography

Callendar, Newgate. “Crime.” Review of Death Drop, by B. M. Gill. The New York Times, September 28, 1980, p. A20. Reviewer praises Gill’s ability to portray disturbed states of mind.

Priestman, Martin. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. An excellent general reference that offers much insight into the genre. Contains a chapter on postwar British crime fiction.

Reynolds, Moira Davison. Women Authors of Detective Series: Twenty-one American and British Authors, 1900-2000. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001. Contains information on female writers of detective series. While Gill is not covered, the essays provide context for her work.

Talburt, Nancy Ellen. “B. M. Gill.” In Great Women Mystery Writers, edited by Kathleen Gregory Klein. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. This valuable source places Gill in critical context with other women writing on similar themes.

Virginia Quarterly Review. Review of Time and Time Again, by B. M. Gill. 66, no. 3 (Summer, 1990): S97. Review of work in which Maeve Barclay has served time for injuring a police officer during a demonstration and her alienation from her former life draws her into crime. Reviewer praises the clarity of Gill’s writing.