A review of Three Sisters Flew Home by Mary Fitt – 230419

Kathleen Freeman, who wrote under three pseudonyms including Mary Fitt, takes us into the leftfield world of crime and mystery fiction occupied by Gladys Mitchell with this novel, originally published in 1936 and reissued by Moonstone Press. Published two years before her first in her Superintendent Mallett series, it would be wrong to categorise it as a murder mystery. Yes, there is a murder, right at the end of the story, and yes, there is a little bit of whodunit and whydunit, if only amongst the suspects who are left to potentially carry the can, but it is more of a study in psychology, of jealousies, tensions, and vendettas.

It takes a little while to realise that Fitt is not going to deliver a conventional murder mystery. The usual suspects are all there; a gathering of people in a house for a New Year’s Eve party, a character who, as the story develops, is revealed to be despised if not hated by all that surround them, and a murder, the victim stabbed with a special dagger. Fitt, though, is much more concerned with building up an atmosphere, of suspense and tension, daring the reader to second guess less what is going to happen but more when and by whom. There is an ethereal, unworldly feel about the book, the sense that some of the characters are not really of this world.

In her day job Freeman was a distinguished Greek scholar and it is inevitable that some of her learning seeps into the book. As a former Classics scholar I did not find the references overtly obscure as some modern readers seem to have done, but it is clear that the story is heavily influenced by Greek tragedy, the sense that something awful is going to happen in accordance with a pre-determined plan that no human intervention can alter. Indeed, the characters are just the puppets of a greater force. The presence of three mysterious sisters who fly away at the end to leave the mere mortals to pick up the pieces is reminiscent of the Moirai, the Fates in Greek mythology who determined human destiny and the time allotted on this Earth.

The party is held by a society sculptress, Claribel, and she has scored something of a coup by inviting three mysterious young sisters, about whom and their earlier interaction with their hostess we learn more as the story develops. The elder two each have a valuable dagger, one of which Lucy gives to a fellow guest, Marcus Praed, who promptly loses it when Claribel throws it out of the window during the quarrel. Inevitably, it is this dagger that is the murder weapon.

The sisters’ presence is not the only unusual feature of the party. It emerges that all the male guests are lovers or former lovers of Claribel, and while her husband, Gilbert, seems to have come to terms with her association with the rugged explorer, Marcus Praed, his eyes are opened to his wife’s serial infidelities. Marcus Praed also learns, perhaps for the first time, that he is not the only string to Claribel’s bow. The atmosphere is full of tension with characters realising the truth with love lost and new alliances beginning to be developed.

A point of interest in the book, which Curtis Evans explains in more detail in his introduction, is the game of Murder!, a party game that was all the rage in the 1930s, a game I first encountered in Ngaio Marsh’s A Man Lay Dying. The game is so popular that it is played three times at Claribel’s party, and that it is played in darkness and involves the “murder” of a victim selected by lot suits the brooding sense of malevolent tension that Fitt is building up. That the murder is committed during the third game seems nothing if not fitting.

There is no attempt to dissemble the identities of the victim and the culprit and why the murder was committed. It is not that sort of book and is not the poorer for lacking what we anticipate in a book taxonomically condemned to be labelled as a work of crime and mystery. The book has its flaws, for sure, but it is the unconventionality of the approach coupled with Fitt’s beautiful if wordy style that sucks the reader in.

I enjoyed what is a refreshing approach to an even by 1936 a tired genre but recognise that it will not be for every crime afficionado.