The Belting Inheritance

November 5, 2018
An intriguing puzzle centered on identity drives this entry in the British Library Crime Classics series, first published in 1965, from MWA Grand Master Symons (1912–1994). Within five weeks in 1944, Lady Wainwright learns that two of her four sons, Hugh and David, are missing in action and
presumed dead. Some years after WWII, Oxford student Christopher Barrington, the nephew of Lady Wainwright, returns to Belting, the family home, after learning that she’s dying of cancer. Lady Wainwright reveals that she has just received a letter purporting to be from David. The writer explains that he escaped his fighter plane’s crash with a minor injury, only to end up in a Russian labor camp for seven or eight years. David’s mother naturally considers the missive a miracle, but her surviving sons are skeptical. The claimant’s arrival at Belting is followed by a murder, whose solution is tied to the question of whether David is an imposter. Symons throws in some clever twists, though the book is less memorable than similarly themed mysteries such as Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar.

November 1, 2018
The latest reprint from the British Library Crime Classics, a bucolic yet close-wound fictional take on the once-famous real-life story of the Tichborne Claimant, reads like Brideshead Revisited with murder.Lady Jessica Wainwright's surviving sons, Miles and Stephen, live with her and Stephen's wife, Clarissa, in Belting, the estate she inherited from Gen. Wainwright when he died in 1940. But she doesn't love any of them; all the love she could give her family was lavished on her older sons, Hugh and David, both of them killed in the war. Some time after she welcomes her orphaned grandnephew, Christopher Barrington to Belting, a letter arrives from David. His bomber was indeed shot down, but he survived only to be imprisoned for long years in a Soviet labor camp. Miles, Stephen, and Clarissa, all of whom feel that they've worked hard for their inheritance, do everything they can to keep Lady Wainwright from hearing about the letter but to no avail, and at length the man claiming to be David arrives at Belting. The men he greets as brothers dismiss him out of hand as an imposter; Christopher, who narrates the story, isn't sure what to believe; and when the family appeals to Betty Urquhart, David's former mistress, and Dr. Vivian Foster, his best friend, for help, their reactions only confuse the situation further. By the time they arrive, however, a murder has already raised the stakes without answering the riddle of whether the man calling himself David Wainwright indeed has a right to the name and to a sizeable share of the estate.Veteran puzzle hounds who guess the ending will still be moved by its power. The tale's valedictory tone, perfectly suited to a story set 10 years before Symons wrote it and hearkening back to social institutions from a still earlier age, is underlined by its reprinting 54 years later.

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November 15, 2018
Another addition to the British Library Crime Classics series restores a mystery, first published in 1964, by Julian Symons, an acclaimed mid-century writer who won two Edgar Awards and the Crime Writers Association (UK) Diamond Dagger. This mystery has a double focus?on a murder but also on a question of identity (with an inheritance at stake). It starts, in Dickensian fashion, with a massive house, called Belting, hung over with massive gloom. The mistress of the house, Lady Wainwright, had four sons, two of whom never returned from WWII. A letter arrives announcing the return of one of the lost sons. The son arrives, and the mother rejoices, but the two other sons in residence believe the new arrival is an imposter. All this is told from the point of view of an 18-year-old orphaned nephew staying at Belting. While the double puzzle is riveting, the nephew's narration is very digressive. He sounds like a much older man, with an oddly archaic ring to his descriptions and dialogue. Nevertheless, a recovered Symons is definitely a good thing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)