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Helping With Inquiries
First American edition. Novel of psychological suspense originally published in England as "Helping with Inquiries."
172 pages, Hardcover
Published August 16, 1979
46 people want to read
About the author
Celia Dale
26 books34 followersNot very much is known about the author Celia Dale except for a few scant details. Celia Dale was born in 1912 and she was daughter of the actor, James Dale and was married to the journalist and critic, Guy Ramsey until his death in 1959. She worked in Fleet Street and as a publishers adviser and book reviewer. Some of her books were dramatised on radio and TV. Dales first book appeared in 1943 but it was her later novels where she branched out in to the realms of psychological crime. In all, Dale produced thirteen novels and a collection of short stories.
Celia Dale took everyday domestic situations and gave them a bitter twist. In Helping with Enquiries there are only three main protagonists, their story revolving around the murder of the mother. In A Helping Hand the vulnerability of the elderly is masterfully portrayed. Dale won the 1986 Crime Writers Association Veuve Cliquot Short Story Award for Lines of Communication which appears in her short story collection, A Personal Call and other stories which show that Dale had the short story down to a fine art. Her final book in 1988 was Sheeps Clothing.
Celia Dale died on the 31st December 2011, just short of her hundredth birthday. - Excerpted from FantasticFiction
Novels
The Least of These (1944)
To Hold the Mirror (1946)
The Dry Land (1952)
The Wooden O (1953)
Trial of Strength (1955)
A Spring of Love (1960)
Other People (1964)
A Helping Hand (1966)
Act of Love (1969)
A Dark Corner (1971)
The Innocent Party (1973)
Helping with Enquiries (1979)
aka The Deception
Sheep's Clothing (1988)
Celia Dale took everyday domestic situations and gave them a bitter twist. In Helping with Enquiries there are only three main protagonists, their story revolving around the murder of the mother. In A Helping Hand the vulnerability of the elderly is masterfully portrayed. Dale won the 1986 Crime Writers Association Veuve Cliquot Short Story Award for Lines of Communication which appears in her short story collection, A Personal Call and other stories which show that Dale had the short story down to a fine art. Her final book in 1988 was Sheeps Clothing.
Celia Dale died on the 31st December 2011, just short of her hundredth birthday. - Excerpted from FantasticFiction
Novels
The Least of These (1944)
To Hold the Mirror (1946)
The Dry Land (1952)
The Wooden O (1953)
Trial of Strength (1955)
A Spring of Love (1960)
Other People (1964)
A Helping Hand (1966)
Act of Love (1969)
A Dark Corner (1971)
The Innocent Party (1973)
Helping with Enquiries (1979)
aka The Deception
Sheep's Clothing (1988)
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 5, 2018
Helping With Inquiries, a novel from 1979, is a deeply psychological character study–a tale of bitterness, isolation, control and motivation for murder.
Helping with Inquiries (and what a great innocuous title that is) begins with Leonard Henderson, a married man in his 60s, a creature of absolute rigid habit, an advertising manager at an old-fashioned dying company, arriving back home after a day’s work. Leonard and his wife, Enid live in a pleasant, semi-detached home in a quiet, middle-class neighbourhood. It’s a terrible shock, then, for Leonard to return home to Cherrywood Crescent and find his wife Enid, a woman that no one seems to really know or talk to, battered to death in the front room.
The Hendersons have lived next door to the their neighbours, the Thorpes for over 20 years, and although they share a “thin party-wall” the two couples only ever exchanged a nod or the few odd words. The Thorpes heard nothing, saw nothing, and are in a state of shock that something like this could have happened in their quiet street.
D.S Simpson and DI Hogarth, two very different men with two very different styles investigate the case. There’s a definite good-cop-bad cop game afoot with Simpson’s strong social skills and affability and the laconic Hogarth who prefers to ambush suspects and witnesses with rudeness. Whereas Simpson is “delighted” by human nature “as intriguing manifestations of the bizarre,” Hogarth is interested in motive only in as much as it furthers the investigation
"This view of his profession gave him a majestic insensitivity which was often useful, outraging or stunning people into shows of emotion that under gentler handling they might have controlled. While they erupted or collapsed, a mind as shrewd if not as intelligent as any judge’s ticked away inside Hogarth’s balding head. If there were something to be noticed, assessed, slotted into place, Hogarth would do it."
As the police detectives poke around the Henderson home, they discover that while no one seems to really know Enid (she has no friends, no social life) she was a magpie, “her untidiness had been concealed, stuffed into drawers and cupboards.” According to Leonard his wife was “a middle-aged woman, –a domesticated, simple, not very clever housewife,” and yet someone hated her enough to beat her to death. But is this a random crime? There’s an alley that runs along the back of the houses. Did some “maniac” wander into the home and murder Enid?
As the novel unfolds, a couple of suspects emerge. Leonard is required to make a written statement, and Leonard’s short, succinct sentences are then juxtaposed with Leonard and Enid's history. Author Celia Dale cleverly reconstructs their courtship and married life. Enid is dead when the book opens, and yet her character is constructed in detail, so that just who she really was is clearly evident.
Yes, this is a crime book, but it’s brilliantly constructed with Dale showing just how much can be accomplished by a crime novel, and while bulky DI Hogarth may not care about motive, readers do. Dale creates a fascinating picture of domestic life and an inexorable case of murder.
Finally, Dale can write. There are some marvellous moments here–most I can’t include due to spoilers. At one point, Leonard lands a job, after the war, at Forbes’ for Furnishing.
"Behind their majestic frontage decline and fall could be sensed. The Board was ageing, the holding company impatient for them to be gone; real estate was more real now than Forbes’ for Furnishing. There was no future there and Leonard knew it with a bitterness that burned deeply behind his cool facade. The Advertising Department consisted of no more than Leonard himself, whatever trainee youth was going through the store, and a typist. The advertisement copy was written by an outside agency and appeared mainly in appropriate local and provincial newspapers. It was, he knew sourly, a dead end job. But at least, he was, at last, Manager.
Enid’s happiness was tactlessly great. She brought a bottle of sparkling white wine with which to celebrate his first week, kissed him and pressed her face against his for a moment. ‘I’m so glad for you Lenny darling. It’s such a relief. I know how anxious you’ve been all these months. And being in an old-fashioned firm’s much nicer really, isn’t it. even if it’s not quite so important.’
In a way she was right. Shutting his mind to everything he might have preferred, he sank himself into the work, treating his tiny department as though it were the most important in the firm, himself its ruler. So the years settled in Cherrywood Crescent, muffling all sounds. "
The book is also a snapshot of its times with reference to Mrs Woodhouse, Women’s Lib and bottom-pinching considered normal behaviour at work.
Helping with Inquiries (and what a great innocuous title that is) begins with Leonard Henderson, a married man in his 60s, a creature of absolute rigid habit, an advertising manager at an old-fashioned dying company, arriving back home after a day’s work. Leonard and his wife, Enid live in a pleasant, semi-detached home in a quiet, middle-class neighbourhood. It’s a terrible shock, then, for Leonard to return home to Cherrywood Crescent and find his wife Enid, a woman that no one seems to really know or talk to, battered to death in the front room.
The Hendersons have lived next door to the their neighbours, the Thorpes for over 20 years, and although they share a “thin party-wall” the two couples only ever exchanged a nod or the few odd words. The Thorpes heard nothing, saw nothing, and are in a state of shock that something like this could have happened in their quiet street.
D.S Simpson and DI Hogarth, two very different men with two very different styles investigate the case. There’s a definite good-cop-bad cop game afoot with Simpson’s strong social skills and affability and the laconic Hogarth who prefers to ambush suspects and witnesses with rudeness. Whereas Simpson is “delighted” by human nature “as intriguing manifestations of the bizarre,” Hogarth is interested in motive only in as much as it furthers the investigation
"This view of his profession gave him a majestic insensitivity which was often useful, outraging or stunning people into shows of emotion that under gentler handling they might have controlled. While they erupted or collapsed, a mind as shrewd if not as intelligent as any judge’s ticked away inside Hogarth’s balding head. If there were something to be noticed, assessed, slotted into place, Hogarth would do it."
As the police detectives poke around the Henderson home, they discover that while no one seems to really know Enid (she has no friends, no social life) she was a magpie, “her untidiness had been concealed, stuffed into drawers and cupboards.” According to Leonard his wife was “a middle-aged woman, –a domesticated, simple, not very clever housewife,” and yet someone hated her enough to beat her to death. But is this a random crime? There’s an alley that runs along the back of the houses. Did some “maniac” wander into the home and murder Enid?
As the novel unfolds, a couple of suspects emerge. Leonard is required to make a written statement, and Leonard’s short, succinct sentences are then juxtaposed with Leonard and Enid's history. Author Celia Dale cleverly reconstructs their courtship and married life. Enid is dead when the book opens, and yet her character is constructed in detail, so that just who she really was is clearly evident.
Yes, this is a crime book, but it’s brilliantly constructed with Dale showing just how much can be accomplished by a crime novel, and while bulky DI Hogarth may not care about motive, readers do. Dale creates a fascinating picture of domestic life and an inexorable case of murder.
Finally, Dale can write. There are some marvellous moments here–most I can’t include due to spoilers. At one point, Leonard lands a job, after the war, at Forbes’ for Furnishing.
"Behind their majestic frontage decline and fall could be sensed. The Board was ageing, the holding company impatient for them to be gone; real estate was more real now than Forbes’ for Furnishing. There was no future there and Leonard knew it with a bitterness that burned deeply behind his cool facade. The Advertising Department consisted of no more than Leonard himself, whatever trainee youth was going through the store, and a typist. The advertisement copy was written by an outside agency and appeared mainly in appropriate local and provincial newspapers. It was, he knew sourly, a dead end job. But at least, he was, at last, Manager.
Enid’s happiness was tactlessly great. She brought a bottle of sparkling white wine with which to celebrate his first week, kissed him and pressed her face against his for a moment. ‘I’m so glad for you Lenny darling. It’s such a relief. I know how anxious you’ve been all these months. And being in an old-fashioned firm’s much nicer really, isn’t it. even if it’s not quite so important.’
In a way she was right. Shutting his mind to everything he might have preferred, he sank himself into the work, treating his tiny department as though it were the most important in the firm, himself its ruler. So the years settled in Cherrywood Crescent, muffling all sounds. "
The book is also a snapshot of its times with reference to Mrs Woodhouse, Women’s Lib and bottom-pinching considered normal behaviour at work.
November 12, 2021
AKA The Deception - published under both titles
First published in 1979, the key characters come from a much earlier and different era. It has the air of a classic crime mystery yet is far more about character than plot.
Suburban London setting - Leonard returns home to find his wife - Edith Henderson, at home, murdered. Whodunnit? The police investigation barely tugs at the edges of the narrative.
This was all about upbringing, emotional neglect, education, standards, class and marriage. Emotional blackmail or even coercive control might be used about the focus of the book today but the way this story unfolds pins it into a Victorian morality despite this being the mid twentieth century.
First published in 1979, the key characters come from a much earlier and different era. It has the air of a classic crime mystery yet is far more about character than plot.
Suburban London setting - Leonard returns home to find his wife - Edith Henderson, at home, murdered. Whodunnit? The police investigation barely tugs at the edges of the narrative.
This was all about upbringing, emotional neglect, education, standards, class and marriage. Emotional blackmail or even coercive control might be used about the focus of the book today but the way this story unfolds pins it into a Victorian morality despite this being the mid twentieth century.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews