Georgette Heyer

• Born: August 16, 1902
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: July 4, 1974
• Place of death: London, England

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; historical; private investigator; thriller; cozy; comedy caper

Principal Series: Superintendent Hannasyde and Sergeant Hemingway, 1935-1953

Contribution

Georgette Heyer’s twelve detective novels are variations of the English country-house mystery. Like her extremely popular historical romances set in the Regency period, her mysteries are witty comedies of manners. Her characters, whether they live in villages, suburban communities, or on London estates, are well-bred and affluent. Heyer has been compared to Jane Austen because, in the world she skillfully creates, manners are morals. Pretension of any kind is ruthlessly exposed. Young women who seek to marry well for mercenary reasons do not succeed in the matrimonial game, but attractive heroines always make a suitable alliance. Although the crimes are solved at the conclusion of her novels, the detection of the murderer is only slightly more important than the resolution of the romantic action, which nearly always results in marriage.

Her mysteries are painstakingly plotted, but suspense is less important than wit in a Heyer mystery. For this reason, her books can be read and reread without a loss of interest. Both violence and passion are suppressed. Maiden aunts and stately dowagers tend to be pleased when a murder occurs because it may give their young relatives something with which to amuse themselves other than tennis, as in Detection Unlimited (1953). Few writers are fortunate enough to have Heyer’s unerring ear for dialogue and sense of the ridiculous. In No Wind of Blame (1939), when an unscrupulous gigolo, whose unpronounceable name leads everyone to call him Prince, pursues his impressionable hostess, his romantic overtures are undercut by a dog who also answers to the name Prince. Many of Heyer’s mysteries are still in print. Like her romances, they are masterpieces of satire and good humor.

Biography

Georgette Heyer, born on August 16, 1902, was the oldest of the three children of George Heyer and Sylvia Watkins. Like the heroine of Helen (1928), one of her early novels, Heyer had a close relationship with her father, after whom she was also named. She received her education at various day schools and later attended The Study, a girls’ school in Wimbledon. She did not attend a university.

In her teens, she became close friends with Joanna Cannan, the daughter of a member of the Oxford University Press, and Carola Oman, the daughter of Sir Charles Oman, a historian. All three women became novelists and published their works under their maiden names. Heyer’s first book, The Black Moth (1921), was published when she was nineteen.

In 1920, she met George Ronald Rougier while their families were spending Christmas at the Bushey Park Hotel. Rougier had wanted to become a barrister, but family pressure prompted him to attend the Royal School of Mines and become an engineer. Heyer became engaged to Rougier in April of 1925, and they were married two months after her father’s death on August 18, 1925. After their marriage, Rougier went prospecting in the Caucasus while Heyer remained in London. She accompanied her husband on his next assignments to Tanganyika and Macedonia. In 1926, Heyer’s first popular success occurred with the publication of These Old Shades, which sold 190,000 copies without the assistance of advertising or reviews. In 1932, at the time that Footsteps in the Dark appeared, her son Richard George Rougier was born.

During the Depression, Ronald opened a sports shop, but with his wife’s encouragement he also studied to become a barrister. The income from Heyer’s books contributed to the support for the family, and she began to write a detective story and a historical romance every year. Rougier, the first reader of her books, also assisted Heyer in plotting her detective stories. Although Heyer’s books were consistently popular, at the time of her death, on July 4, 1974, she had not yet received the critical appreciation that her work merits.

Analysis

During the 1930’s, the mystery novel became increasingly respectable. Agatha Christie was already well known, and Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh were establishing themselves in the genre. Georgette Heyer joined this group of talented female writers with Footsteps in the Dark, which appeared the same year as Devil’s Cub (1932), one of her popular Regency romances.

Footsteps in the Dark

This experiment in what she called the thriller concerns a haunted house that later proves to be the headquarters for a gang of forgers who are trying to frighten the new owners into moving away. Although not without merit, Footsteps in the Dark served as an apprentice novel for Heyer. Her next two mysteries, Why Shoot a Butler? (1933) and The Unfinished Clue (1934), show that she had mastered the craft.

The Unfinished Clue

Both these novels are related to the country-house mystery, which was to become Heyer’s most successful and characteristic genre. Whether the setting is a small English village or an affluent suburb, the interest in a Heyer novel is generated by the characters and their witty dialogue. The Unfinished Clue contains a marvelous character, Lola de Silva, who is an exotic dancer and the highly unacceptable fiancée of Geoffrey Billington-Smith. Lola deplores the lack of absinthe for her cocktails and insists that a painting of a dead hare be removed from the dining room because it will make it impossible for her to eat. After carefully explaining to the detectives her motives and opportunities for killing Geoffrey’s father, she acknowledges: “I did not stab the General, because I did not think of it, and besides, in England I find it does not make one popular to kill people.”

Death in the Stocks

Death in the Stocks (1935) introduced the twodetectives Superintendent Hannasyde and Sergeant Hemingway, who were to figure in a number of Heyer’s mysteries. Death in the Stocks was reviewed by both The Times of London and The Times Literary Supplement, and it was also dramatized, although unsuccessfully. The adaptation must have been inept, for the dialogue in Death in the Stocks is especially successful. Giles Carrington, the Verekers’ cousin and solicitor, solves the murder and also wins the hand of Antonia Vereker, his distant cousin and the murder victim’s half sister. Violet Williams, a beautiful but empty-headed gold digger, is engaged to Kenneth Vereker, the victim’s half brother and heir. Antonia accuses Violet of not caring if something is good to look at “as long as it reeks of money.” In the well-bred world of the Verekers, Violet’s lack of taste is emblematic of her mercenary values.

When Kenneth Vereker is cleared of having committed the murder, Hannasyde says that they will have to release him:

“Let him go?” said Hemingway. “You’ll have a job to make him go. The last I saw of him he was asking what they’d charge for board-residence till he’s finished a set of the most shocking pictures you ever laid eyes on. Portraits of the Police, he calls them. Libels, I call them.”

The murderer proves to be Violet, whom Kenneth’s relatives and the reader are relieved to have removed from the picture, and marriages supply the final denouement.

No Wind of Blame

Heyer described her novels as a collaborative enterprise with her husband. He devised the plots in terms of figures identified very abstractly as A, B, and C. She then supplied the characterizations:

I do these things with the assistance—and ONLY the assistance of G. R. Rougier. . . . [He] still dines out on his version of what happened over No Wind of Blame, which was a highly technical shooting mystery. . . . I DID know, broadly speaking, how the murder was committed, but I didn’t clutter up my mind with the incomprehensible details. Ronald swears that he came home one evening when I was at work on the final, explanatory chapter and that I said to him: “If you’re not too busy, could you tell me just how this murder was committed?”

The way in which her mystery novels were constructed may explain why Heyer’s detective fiction never became as popular as that of Christie and Sayers. The witty dialogue and amusing incidents, rather than the suspense of the plot, generate the interest in Heyer’s novels.

The title of No Wind of Blame is borrowed from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1602), but the tone is vintage Heyer. It is not surprising that Ronald Rougier had to explain to his wife how the murder was committed. It requires all the ingenuity of the police to work out the complex details of the shooting. The story begins with the arrival of Prince Alexis Varasashvili, a phony gigolo, who is only too willing to make up to his hostess Ermyntrude Carter both before and after her husband, Wally Carter, has been murdered.

Ermyntrude is a former chorus girl who dyes her hair and overdoes her makeup; her large fortune was inherited from Geoffrey Fanshawe, her first husband. In spite of her vulgarity, Ermyntrude is kindhearted; she has ungrudgingly provided a home for Mary Cliffe, Wally’s cousin and ward. At the end of the novel, she insists on sheltering the offspring of her husband’s murderer, even though the awkwardness of assisting them is pointed out to her.

Ermyntrude’s daughter, Vicky Fanshawe, seems to have inherited her father’s intelligence. Pretty, but not at all empty-headed, Vicky eases the atmosphere of the country house party turned into a murder case by dramatizing herself in roles, complete with appropriate costumes. Her roles range from the ingenue to the brazen hussy to Lady Jane Grey on her way to the block. Vicky blocks the prince’s pursuit of her mother and promotes the suit of Robert Steel, who is strong, silent, and sincere. Both Vicky and Mary find suitable mates, and it is clear that Ermyntrude will soon wed Steel.

The detectives in Heyer’s mysteries function intellectually to explain the murder. In No Wind of Blame, Hemingway explains to one of his many subordinates the way a police officer should go about his work and the secrets of his success in detecting criminals:

“The secret of being a highly efficient officer,” said Hemingway, fixing him with a quelling look, “is on the one hand never to expect anything, and on the other never to be surprised at anything either. You remember that, my lad, and you may do as well as I have.”

A dabbler in psychology, Hemingway gets along well with the gentry whom he has to interview. His ingenuity is complemented by his common sense. He dislikes socialists, young women wearing vermillion nail polish, and men who overly decorate their apartments, but these prejudices do not interfere with his solutions to the crimes.

They Found Him Dead

Two of Heyer’s most successful works, They Found Him Dead (1937) and Duplicate Death (1951), involve the Harte family. Lady Harte has extraordinary energy, which she expends on expeditions into the Congo, running for Parliament, and overseeing the lives of her two sons. James Kane, her eldest son by her deceased first husband, is at first the suspect and then the victim of several unsuccessful murder attempts in They Found Him Dead. Timothy Harte is the product of Lady Harte’s second marriage with Sir Adrian. To protect his stepbrother from being murdered in his sleep, the youthful Timothy constructs a series of alarms that he attaches to the doorknob. Sir Adrian, who is as vague and urbane as his wife is energetic, naturally sets off the alarm while looking for a book.

When his stepson’s fiancée tells Sir Adrian that he can afford to be calm, because Jim is neither his fiancé nor his own son, Sir Adrian replies: “Certainly not in the least like my fiance. And, I am happy to say, not much like my own son either. Though I have no doubt that Timothy will improve as he grows older.” It comes as no surprise to the reader that Sir Adrian has already figured out the identity of the murderer before the police reveal it.

Duplicate Death

In Duplicate Death, Timothy, grown up and a solicitor, has fallen in love with Beulah Birtley, a sullen young woman, who Lady Harte fears is an adventuress. Beulah is employed as a secretary by the sinister Mrs. Haddington, whose blond-haired daughter Cynthia is as pretty as she is vacuous and self-centered. James Kane comes to town to inspect Beulah Birtley and arrives just in time for, first, the murder of Dan Seaton-Carew during a game of duplicate bridge and, second, the murder of Mrs. Haddington in a manner that duplicates the first. It turns out that Beulah was framed for forgery and has spent time in prison, a fact that engages Lady Harte’s sympathies and wins her support of the marriage.

In Duplicate Death, in a rare moment of self-revelation and with impeccable wit, Heyer describes Timothy’s reaction to being asked about one of his mother’s books, a book that he has not read:

Timothy, who shared with his half-brother, Mr. James Kane, an ineradicable conviction that the Second World War had been inaugurated by providence to put an end to their beloved but very trying parent’s passion for exploring remote quarters of the globe, bowed, and murmured one of the conventional acknowledgements with which the more astute relatives of an author take care to equip themselves.

Mysteries are more acceptable to critics than romances, so it is not surprising that Heyer’s detective fiction has received more critical attention than her Regency romances. For Heyer, however, detective fiction was less profitable; her last detective novel was written in 1953, twenty-one years before her death in 1974. With her twelve books in the mystery and detective genre, she contributed substantially to the tradition of the English country-house mystery, producing a unique blend of humor and crime.

Principal Series Characters:

• Superintendent Hannasyde and
• Sergeant Hemingway are both adept at dealing with “country house and village” murders, where the suspects are likely to belong to the privileged classes. Hemingway gradually replaces Hannasyde as the chief inspector, and he is assisted by a series of young men who act as foils for Hemingway’s cleverness.

Bibliography

Bargainnier, Earl K. “The Dozen Mysteries of Georgette Heyer.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 3 (Fall/Winter, 1982): 30-39. Brief but comprehensive overview of all twelve of Heyer’s mystery novels.

Boucher, Anthony. Introduction to A Blunt Instrument. Oxford, England: William Heinemann, 1966. Appreciation of Heyer’s novel written by a fellow author of crime fiction.

Byatt, A. S. “Miss Georgette Heyer.” The Times (London). July 6, 1974. Heyer’s obituary, written by the author of Possession.

Fahnestock-Thomas, Mary, ed. Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective. Saraland, Ala.: PrinnyWorld Press, 2001. This hefty volume includes several of Heyer’s uncollected short stories and essays, as well as book reviews, criticism, and a bibliography of her works and film and theater reviews of their theatrical and cinematic adaptations.

Hodge, Jane Aiken. The Private World of Georgette Heyer. London: Bodley Head, 1984. Covers Heyer’s romantic and historical fiction, as well as her mystery stories.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Contains an essay on Heyer’s life and works.

Kloester, Jennifer. Georgette Heyer’s Regency World. London: William Heinemann, 2005. While focused on Heyer’s historical fiction, this study provides many insights into the role and importance of setting in her work.