Time for Tea

by John Coates

Real wit, charm and freshness distinguish this baffler by a new young British author. His attractive hero, James Etheridge, toys idly with the idea of writing detective fiction, and decides to enact a possible murder in a real-life situation -omitting only the one step of actually killing his chosen victim. Before long he stumbles upon the perfect set-up when he is invited to spend a vacation at Torrinton, the beautiful country house of his friend, Alec Potts. There he meets the mean, vindictive artist who becomes his "victim". As might be suspected, the artist becomes a bona fide corpse, and our hero's harmless fiction has become fact. To add to the complications of this situation, James falls in love with the dead man's lovely step-daughter, and she with him, even though she believes him to be a murderer.

266 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1950

About the author

John Coates was born in 1912 into a Yorkshire engineering family. He went to Haileybury and then read English at Cambridge, where he spent most of his time acting and writing plays and became President of Footlights.

See: Persephone Books

Reviews

[Ann · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book to be an uneasy amalgam of three different writing styles. On one hand, it's a country house mystery in the pre-WWII style. Torrinton, the delightful country house belonging to the painter Alec Potts, is the scene of a classic house party, to which the protagonist, a young man restlessly casting about for something to do after being demobbed, is invited by the daughter of the house, Angela. She feels she needs a friend of her own, because the other guests, with the exception of the Edwardian coquette Mrs. Drew, are not to her liking. In acts of misguided hospitality, the Pottses have invited Christopher Norton, a writer of sentimental newpaper kitsch, his clingy girlfriend Jennifer, and the disagreeable and unsuccesful painter Short. James, the hero, is prepared to enjoy a few days of good food, swimming and sunning. He also toys with the idea of trying out a murder scene, preparatory to launching himself into the detective novel business. Alas, someone really does murder the unpleasant Short, and the detective called to the scene, is relentless is ascertaining people's whereabouts.

So that is, as I said, well within the tradition of the country house mystery.

The second writing style is that of a parody of Hemingway. Tim Potts, a successful author in his own right, actually provides the aspiring writer James with a plot and atmosphere for a novel in the Hemingway tradition, tongue firmly planted in cheek. The problem is, that at some point, I realized that the dialogue between James and Diana, Short's step-daughter, who appears on the scene after the murder, is entirely molded on the terse, emotionally dense interchanges between Hemingway heroes and their love interests. The result is unintentionally bizarre, with strange fluctuations between sexual explicitness (for the time) and coy statements about Diana's virginity. I also think that James, who was largely educated in France and had a charming, but unreliable father, is supposed to be a bit of an outsider in this essentially English scene. Anyway, the world-weary exchanges during the insta-romance between James and Diana were out of place in the otherwise bucolic scene.

Third, there is an attempt to insert Agatha Christie-like twists and surprises in the solution to the mystery. The author had not been subtle about planting the clues, and I saw it coming a mile off.

In summary : this book was like a croissant with kale filling washed down with a glass of grapefruit juice. Each ingredient works well enough of its own, but together... not for me.