Dying Horribly at Harding Hall (The Harding Hall Mysteries)

A MARVELOUSLY ENTERTAINING MYSTERY-FARCE

In Dying Horribly at Harding Hall, we meet a wealthy, aristocratic English family-generation after generation-of lecherous and greedy muttonheads. The story focuses on eleven mysterious deaths, with several extras along the way. There's dry and sly humor from the start, but it's only as the tapestry unfolds that we realize the truth-and the truth is becoming more and more crazed. As the farce builds, the deaths-and the motives-become outrageous, and often hilarious. But they never quite become incredible. That's because these tales of stupidity, greed, lechery, and brutality, though they may stretch our credulity on occasion, remain sadly in line with human nature.

Going back to the 1920s, the heirs of Harding Hall have been dying bizarre and apparently accidental deaths. Our heroes, or more accurately antiheroes, brothers Lars and Loris Harding, have decided to call in a supposedly brilliant detective from India named Depak Chota. It's not that they are that deeply concerned about the deaths of their mostly despicable relatives. Rather, their interest has become a bit more urgent now that they are next in line to inherit Harding Hall.

Despite the extravagant, sometimes even absurd, ways in which Hardings have been dying, the police have accepted each death as an accident. Some of the accidents seem fairly plausible: One man is apparently killed by lightning; another thrown off a horse and impaled on an iron-spiked wall. Two die of tropical diseases while traveling abroad. A wayward artillery shell explodes in the gallery of an air show, killing another. One Harding meets his fate by being hit over the head with a can of paint; another dies while crossing the street and being struck by a drunken car thief.

But then... there's the Harding who wanders away during a cocktail party, falls down a chimney and then slowly roasts to death while the party goes on. There's also the seasick Harding on a trans-Atlantic cruise that falls over the railing and then is seen being devoured by a giant fish. For good measure there's a non-heir death in which the wife of one Harding is shot during a tryst with another Harding. The lover's story is that someone in a gorilla suit kicked in the door, shot the woman, tipped his hat, and then climbed out a window.

Along with detective Chota and narrator Loris Harding, the reader gradually learns more about each death. With each revelation the picture becomes both more vivid and ludicrous. There can be no doubt that someone is killing Hardings.

The characters are picturesque and highly individual. They have characteristic habits and gestures, such as Lars's tendency to drop his glass of scotch or his jaw, sending his pipe flying, whenever he is accused of anything. He is thought by many to be a bumbling idiot. But then maybe that's what he wants people to think. Loris seems clever and sensible. Yet, he has a propensity to entangle himself in unwise relationships with bawdy women.

There are recurring motifs and, though with a light touch, some disturbing philosophical questions. All the major characters are sharply delineated, yet each seems composed in one way or another of a perplexing mix of this or that type of intelligence or talent... along with flaws, blind spots... and varieties of buffoonish stupidity. Who's smart and who isn't? Everybody and nobody, it seems. The humor strikes home, occasionally, as we may notice just a bit of ourselves.