Touch and Go, by Patricia Wentworth

When I first came across the recent Dean Street Press reprints of Patricia Wentworth's books, I had no idea where to start. I have been collecting and enjoying her "Miss Silver" books for a couple of years now, without realizing that she wrote so many others without Miss Silver. From the helpful list in the front of the DSP books, I discovered there are three mini-series with different detectives, and a raft of standalone books. I'd hoped to collect the three featuring Miss Silver's frequent collaborators from Scotland Yard, her favorite Frank Abbott and his boss Ernest Lamb. But Murder by Book doesn't have those yet. So I decided to look at the books were published in the 1930s and early 1940s, since so many of my favorite Miss Silvers fall in those years. The DSP books helpfully include the publication date on the back cover.

Touch and Go was published in 1934, in the UK as Devil in the Dark. It isn't a mystery so much as a novel of suspense. Sarah Trent, a young woman of good family and no money, gets a place as companion to 17-year-old Lucilla Hildred, who has just lost her mother and step-father in a car crash. Lucilla's father died in the Great War, as did his younger brother. The recent death of another uncle has left her the heiress to the Hildred property. Lucilla's guardians are worried about her, not least because she had to be taken away from her school, after mysteries fires kept breaking out in her room. Sarah meets her young charge when Lucilla falls down nearly under the wheels of Sarah's car. There have been other incidents - is Lucilla causing them? And why is a man named John Brown wandering around the grounds, supposedly painting the scenery - but what's his excuse in the middle of the night?

Sarah is one of Patricia Wentworth's independent and sassy heroines, and Lucilla is more than a match for her. I enjoyed watching them run rings around Lucilla's elderly guardian Aunt Marina Hildred - actually a cousin, as she will explain in great detail to anyone she can catch (I deal with enthusiastic family historians on a regular basis). And I knew that Patricia Wentworth is a fan of Charlotte M. Yonge's books, but I was still happily surprised when Lucilla of all people quoted from The Pillars of the House.

I had a pretty good idea of where the story was going, but I still peeked ahead to see if I was right. I was in the essentials but not in the details, which had a couple of nice twists I didn't see coming. I toss the term "favorite" around a lot with Patricia Wentworth's books, but this one went straight to the top of my list.