Let's Choose Executors, page 1
sara woods
let’s choose executors
Sara woods, the pen name of Eileen Mary Lana Hutton Bowen Judd, was born in 1916 in Bradford, Yorkshire. She was the daughter of Francis Burton Hutton, a garage proprietor and Sara Roberta Woods, the daughter of a buyer for an engineering firm.
In 1946 she married electrical engineer Anthony George Bowen Judd. Following a dozen years of farming in rural Yorkshire, the couple moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada in 1958, where Sara began her prolific mystery writing career. She became well-known for her detective series featuring canny barrister Antony Maitland—a character inspired by her beloved older brother, Antony Woods Hutton, a promising young solicitor who was tragically killed in 1941 at the age of 33 when as a Royal Air Force pilot in the Second World War his plane was shot down during action in Egypt.’ detective novels were celebrated for their intricate plots and the authenticity of their courtroom settings and they garnered a longtime, loyal readership. Sara passed away at the age of 69 on November 6, 1985, leaving behind her a rich legacy of four dozen Antony Maitland mysteries.
ANTONY MAITLAND MYSTERIES
Bloody Instructions 1962
Malice Domestic 1962
The Taste of Fears/The Third Encounter 1963
Error of the Moon 1963
Trusted Like the Fox 1964
This Little Measure 1964
The Windy Side of the Law 1965
Though I Know She Lies 1965
Enter Certain Murderers 1966 1966
The Case Is Altered 1967
And Shame the Devil 1967
Knives Have Edges 1968
Past Praying For 1968
Tarry and be Hanged 1969
An Improbable Fiction 1970
Serpent’s Tooth 1971
The Knavish Crows 1971
They Love Not Poison 1972
Yet She Must Die 1973
Enter the Corpse 1973
Done to Death 1974
A Show of Violence 1975
My Life Is Done 1976
The Law’s Delay 1977
A Thief or Two 1977
Exit Murderer 1978
This Fatal Writ 1979
Proceed to Judgement 1979
They Stay for Death 1980
Weep for Her 1980
Dearest Enemy 1981
Cry Guilty 1981
Enter a Gentlewoman 1982
Villains by Necessity 1982
Most Grievous Murder 1982
Call Back Yesterday 1983
The Lie Direct 1983
Where Should He Die? 1983
The Bloody Book of the Law 1984
Murder’s Out of Tune 1984
Defy the Devil 1984
And Obscure Grave 1985
Away with Them to Prison 1985
Put out the Light 1985
Most Deadly Hate 1986 (post.)
Nor Live So Long 1986 (post.)
Naked Villainy 1987 (post.)
SARA WOODS
let’s choose executors
With an introduction
by Curtis Evans
DEAN STREET PRESS
Published by Dean Street Press 2025
Copyright © 1966, Sara Woods
Introduction copyright © 2025 Curtis Evans
All Rights Reserved
Published by license, issued under the
UK Orphan Works Licensing Scheme.
First published in 1966 by Collins
Cover by DSP
ISBN 978 1 917382 24 3
www.deanstreetpress.co.uk
introduction
The years 1964 to 1966 saw the continued waning of the Golden Age generation of British Crime Queens with the death of the terminally ill Margery Allingham, who passed away in 1966 at the age of sixty-two while struggling to finish a final Albert Campion mystery novel, which was completed by her husband, Philip Youngman Carter, and posthumously published two years later. Carter, who was continuing the series, himself died in 1969 after penning but a pair of additional Campions. Exeunt Allingham and Campion. Meanwhile the seemingly indefatigable Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh, both of whom were now in their seventies, carried on, Christie even still managing to produce for the delectation of her devoted readership an annual detective novel, her coveted “Christies for Christmas.” In these three years there came from her hand two Miss Marple mysteries in 1964 and 1965 and the return of Hercule Poirot, after a three-year absence, in 1966, all of them happy reads, even Poirot’s Third Girl, which takes place in a not always plausibly swinging London. In this period Christie’s rival queens Allingham and Marsh published novels only in 1965 and 1966 respectively.
Of the new generation of Crime Queens, P. D. James produced but a single Inspector Adam Dalgliesh detective novel, Unnatural Death, in the years between 1963 and 1971, while Ruth Rendell with From Doon with Death introduced her Inspector Reginald Wexford in 1964, returning to him belatedly three years later. Patricia Moyes, on the other hand, got her style mostly down by this time with her Inspector Henry Tibbett series, publishing Johnny Under Ground, her strongest detective novel up to that date, the sixth in the series, in 1965; and in The Religious Body Catherine Aird made an impressive debut with her Inspector C. D. Sloan series in 1966. Besting them all in terms of productivity was Yorkshire-born Canadian émigré Sara Woods, who followed up her critically acclaimed initial quintet of Antony Maitland detective novels with five more Maitland opuses: This Little Measure (1964), The Windy Side of the Law (1965), Though I Know She Lies (1965), Enter Certain Murderers (1966) and Let’s Choose Executors (1966).
Sara Woods was still developing the series in this period, yet she achieved increasing mastery with each passing year, as well as greater creative independence from her queenly predecessors from the Golden Age of detective fiction. As for her barrister sleuth Antony Maitland, he, like other great detectives from the past, was developing his own characteristic tics and quirks—his stammer when angry, his aching shoulder (a result of his World War Two service), his doodles, his scrawled lists on envelopes, his signature phrase “I see,” his pet name of “love” for his steadfast wife Jenny—as well as a real passion for justice on behalf of the cruelly downtrodden and wickedly victimized.
This Little Measure
To her sixth mystery (as well as her seventh; see below) Sara Woods appended a prefatory note, in which she explained to her readers that the events in the novel transpired before those which she had detailed earlier in the year in Trusted Like the Fox, wherein Antony had risen to the senior Bar and was trying his own case; thus, the novel is set no later than some time in 1962. (Fox is set in 1962.) This is just as well, for This Little Measure is a highly traditional crime concoction indeed, concerning murder within a wealthy, eccentric and rather inbred London family, the Gaskells, owners of a prominent shipping line. Classically, there is even a family tree as frontispiece. One suspects that the family surname was deliberately chosen to recall Victorian author Elizabeth Gaskell and her classic novels of manners like Cranford and North and South.
The whole genteelly murderous affair commences with the discovery, in the aftermath of the death of family patriarch Roderick Gaskell (the so-called “Pirate King”), of a shocking family secret concerning a stolen Diego Velasquez painting, one that is rather a companion piece to the great seventeenth-century Spanish artist’s famed Lady with a Fan. When one of the Gaskells dies from poisoning (aconitine in a vitamin capsule) and the late Roderick Gaskell’s impetuous grandson Roddy is arrested for the crime, Antony Maitland is drawn into the case, the Gaskells being friends of the family as well as neighbors on Kempenfeldt Square. It also does not hurt that Antony’s wife Jenny is a cousin of Liz Traynor, who appears rather smitten indeed with charming if erratic Roddy. Heading the defense is Antony’s uncle, Sir Nicholas Harding, the famed Queen’s Counsel, who remains as amusingly irascible as ever.
When it was published in 1966, This Little Measure was notably anachronistic, with characters and a social milieu seemingly more at home in the Thirties than the Sixties. Among the Gaskells there is even a young woman, Roddy’s sister Dorrie (short for Dorcas!), who is finally resolved “to take the first step toward independence and try to find a job.” When she laments “I’ve not been trained for anything,” Roddy archly tells her, as if aware of their family’s anachronism, “Oh, come now! . . . The pianoforte . . . water-colour painting . . . what I’m always expecting Gran to call ‘your stitchery.’ No expense spared, my girl.” In short, This Little Measure is a classic manners mystery reminiscent of similar eccentric family mysteries from the Thirties and Forties, like Allingham’s Police at the Funeral (1932) and More Work for the Undertaker (1948), Agatha Christie’s The Hollow (1946) and Crooked House (1949) and Ngaio Marsh’s Surfeit of Lampreys (1941), with a raft of witty repartee, polite sipping of sherry, domineering elders and genteel suspects, not to mention such accoutrements as a butler (Sir Nicholas’s unflagging Gibbs), a sullen parlourmaid “pushing a laden trolley” of comestibles and yet more aconitine, this time devilishly placed in the anchovy paste.
“Since being a member of the family means no more than freedom to participate in its quarrels, it is not altogether an enviable privilege,” tartly pronounces one individual suspected of rashly desiring to marry into the Gaskell clan. No little measure of comic relief is
This Little Measure is a fine detective novel indeed, yet one which felt decidedly retro in the year of Our Lord 1964, when British rock groups like The Beatles invaded America, mod fashion model Twiggy perched on the verge of superstardom and a nonagenarian Winston Churchill finally retired from parliament. (The Old Man died the next year.) One can hardly imagine rock music or The Ed Sullivan Show even existing in the Noel Coward world of Measure, but Winston Churchill would seem right at home. Although Francis Iles, a superannuated Golden Ager himself, when reviewing the novel in the Guardian pronounced that he had “read with pleasure how Anthony [sic] Maitland pulled a fast one at the last moment to solve the mystery of a missing Velasquez and a double murder,” he nevertheless reflected that the novel possessed “a rather more obviously contrived plot than usual,” which is a fair criticism.
In Sara Woods’ adopted home of Canada This Little Measure became the subject in the Montreal Star of an incisive review article by prominent Canadian journalist Walter O’Hearn. In contrast with what he deemed the “increasingly dreary pastiches” which plagued hard-boiled American mystery, O’Hearn pronounced, “her English whodunit is alive and flourishing.” Woods’ Measure was a prime example. The émigré author, he argued, thoroughly knew her stuff. Antony along with his wife and uncle were “characters of almost comic-strip durability, like Poirot and his dull friend Hastings or [the Lockridges’] Mr. and Mrs. North.” Allowing that there was what he without derision termed “staginess” to her work, O’Hearn nevertheless argued that it was “staginess of a special kind.” “If Mrs. Woods fits all too easily in an old-fashioned theatrical formula, she has the compensating virtues of the dealer in old theatrics,” the critic elucidated. “Her dramatic climaxes may be clichés, but she knows how to build them. Her scenes are well plotted and sustain their own weight. And her surprises are truly surprising.”
Had Woods’ sixth detective novel actually been published three decades earlier, her publisher Collins might have titled it The Mystery of the Vanishing Velasquez. Perhaps not altogether surprisingly, the novel was turned down by her American publisher, Harper & Row, who earlier that year had published Trusted like a Fox, presumably on account of its old-fashioned style. Even Christie, Allingham and Marsh were writing more up-to-date mysteries by this time. Unstinting with vintage murderous charm as Measure is, Sara Woods was to conclude that the way forward for her crime work required a greater embrace of the modern, if not mod, world of the Sixties.
The Windy Side of the Law
In The Windy Side of the Law, which, like its immediate predecessor This Little Measure, is set before the events detailed in Trusted like the Fox, Sara Woods draws both on an old trope—the character who has lost his/her memory and is implicated in nefarious wrongdoing—and a crime of relatively more recent vintage: heroin smuggling. Illegal drug rings were certainly a common enough feature of Golden Age mystery fiction, but typically cocaine, fashionable with posh between-the-wars decadents, was the drug of the author’s choice. Heroin had been introduced as a cough and pain remedy by the Bayer Company way back in 1898, but the opiate’s use greatly increased after the Second World War when it was embraced by Fifties hepcat culture.
In The Windy Side of the Law the imperiled amnesiac, Peter Hammond, is a childhood friend of Antony Maitland. When in the prologue of the novel he wakes up in a strange room in London with no memory of who he is, he discovers but one slender clue to his identity—a piece of paper with Antony’s name scrawled on it. Peter visits Antony and his wife Jenny at the house on Kempenfeldt Square and begins to learn about himself, but almost immediately he finds himself accused of heroin smuggling (he had just returned from a trip abroad), with even worse soon to come!
Fortunately, Peter has true friends in the goodhearted Maitlands, although Antony’s eminent Queen’s Counsel uncle, Sir Nicholas Harding, takes, as always, a more skeptical view of erring humanity. “Don’t tell me,” he skeptically scoffs, “another lame dog!” Of Peter’s lost memory Sir Nicholas takes a dubious view: “It is altogether too convenient, too specious . . . Do you expect the court to share your credulity?” Peter’s case looks bleak indeed, but things get bleaker yet when the police accuse him as well of murder. Antony begins to suspect his friend is the victim of a diabolical conspiracy, but can he find the proof?
At times this mystery resembles a thriller as Antony finds himself during his investigation in peril of his own liberty and life. Sara Woods’ American publisher Harper & Row snapped up the manuscript like a fish eagerly swallowing a bright, shiny lure, additionally publishing a paperback edition in its “Joan Kahn-Harper Novel of Suspense” series. (Joan Kahn was Harper’s crime fiction editor.) To American readers it must have been a little confusing when Roddy Gaskell from This Little Measure is mentioned, but impressed reviewers in the States highly praised the book’s action-filled plot. In decided New World idiom, Indianan Shirley Combs at the Evansville Press pronounced it an “engrossing mystery” and a “corker” and “goodern” that “heads toward a zoomeroo of a climax, a real big deal.” Less colorfully though rhymingly Virginia Pagley at Newsday called The Windy Side of the Law a “delightfully complicated story of drugs and thugs and amnesia,” while Wilton Garrison of North Carolina’s Charlotte Observer deemed it a “very puzzling and exciting novel, extremely well told.” Once again, the Anglo-Canadian author was back in the good graces of those odduns across the border.
Though I Know She Lies
Harper & Row was less taken with Sara Woods’ next Antony Maitland detective novel, Though I Know She Lies—though, in my view, the novel was her best book up to this point. Taking a similar stance to mine at the time was the prominent English crime fiction critic F. E. (Frank Ernest) Pardoe, known familiarly as Bill, who for years reviewed crime fiction for the Birmingham Post and chaired the Crime Writers Association’s Gold Dagger Committee for the best crime novel of the year. In the Post Bill Pardoe wrote approvingly of the author in Though I Know She Lies: “Since she began writing crime novels just over three years ago, the industrious Sara Woods has produced eight, and the last, ‘Though I Know She Lies,’ is the best of the bunch. Some of her earlier books had too much cozy domestic chit-chat . . . She now seems to have achieved the right proportions for all the ingredients in her story . . . The result is excellent.”
Indeed, it is. Though I Know She Lies—which is set in 1963, after the events in Trusted like the Fox (finally!)—opens with beautiful (too beautiful?), titian-haired Barbara Wentworth in the dock, on trial for the fatal poisoning of her wealthy divorced sister, Laura Canning, whose heir she happened to be. Esteemed barrister Sir Nicholas Harding, Q. C., tasked with Barbara’s defense, tells his nephew Antony Maitland, that he fears that “the case for the prosecution is almost overwhelming”; and it surely does not help matters that his junior, Derek Stringer, “has gone off the deep end over our client.” Sir Nicholas wants Antony to do some dispassionate investigating on his own bat, a stance which moves the younger man to remark ironically to his empathetic wife Jenny: “Reversal of roles . . . Usually I’m trying to interest him in something, and he’s resisting like mad.”
Although written, presumably, only one year after This Little Measure, Though I Know She Lies should strike readers as decidedly more up-to-date. The passions of the characters and the situations in which they find themselves enmeshed feel bracingly real, in contrast with the deliberately contrived Golden Age staginess of Measure. In contrast with the passive Dorrie Gaskell in Measure, Barbara Wentworth is a strong, complex person and “working girl,” a model—or mannequin, as they would have said in the Thirties—at a fashionable dress shop who lives in a “third girl” setup with two other young women from the shop, recalling Agatha Christie’s “mod” mystery novel from the next year. Sir Nicholas complains that “her disposition is not really tractable . . . she’s as stubborn as a mule.” It seems evident that Barbara is telling lies, but is she doing so to protect herself or others? This is one occasion when Woods’ customary Shakespearean book title, this one drawn from Sonnet 138, is apt indeed: “When my love swears that she is made of truth/I do believe her, though I know she lies.”
