Outrageous Fortune, by Patricia Wentworth

This 1933 book is one of Patricia Wentworth's "stand-alone" stories, and it is quite a wild ride. It begins with a young man lying in a cottage hospital, unconscious but occasionally muttering about Jimmy Riddell. He was found lying on a ledge of rock, above a treacherous bay where a ship was recently lost. A woman named Nesta Riddell arrives in response to a radio appeal, announces that he is her husband, and whisks him away. A short time later, another woman shows up, also in search of this young man. But she is looking for Jim Randall, the cousin she hasn't seen in seven years. It was clear from her first appearance that this young woman would be our heroine:

    "Miss Leigh?" said the day sister.
    "Oh yes," said Caroline Leigh in that warm dark voice of hers.
    Someone once said that Caroline's voice was like damask roses. He was an infatuated young man who wrote poetry. Caroline laughed at him kindly but firmly, and all her friends chaffed her about her crimson voice. All the same there was something in it.

Hearing that the unknown Jim has been taken away, Caroline resolves to track him down, just confirm that he isn't her Jim. Meanwhile, he wakes up in a small house in a small town. He has no idea who or where he is, but he has a nagging memory of a string of emeralds, shining in lamplight. Informed that he is Jim Riddell, husband of Nesta, he finds that hard to accept. And then Nesta tells him that he has stolen a string of emeralds, and she wants her share. Jim also learns that the owner of the emeralds, an American named Elmer Von Berg, has been shot, presumably during the robbery, and is at the point of death.

The story alternates between Jim and Caroline, as he tries to figure out who he is and what is happening, and she tries to find out where and who he is. There is considerable tension in those sections. In between her sleuthing, Caroline goes home, to the house that she shares with her older cousin Pansy Ann. Pansy (christened plain Ann) "sketched a little, and gardened a little, and painted a little on china. She also wrote minor verse..." Perhaps Patricia Wentworth meant her to add some humor to the story, to lighten the tension from time to time, but I feel like those sections interrupted a much more interesting story, and put it rather out of balance.

This was a fun read, even without Miss Silver. I still have a few of the non-series books to read, as well as two Miss Silvers, and two others featuring her frequent collaborators Ernest Lamb and Frank Abbott of Scotland Yard. I can't imagine how those two will manage to solve any crimes without her! I'm sure I'll still have something of Patricia Wentworth's on the TBR shelves when her turn comes in Jane's reading celebration (on November 10th). But if not, I've already discovered the joys of re-reading her books.