The Brading Collection

I have read almost all the Miss Silver mysteries, and just love this genre. I didn't think I was going to like this book at first. It's kind of different. BUT! The ending was just great! Different than most of her endings. Really loved this and recommend for Miss Silver fans. If you don't know Miss Silver, these books are rather along the same vein as Margaret Erskine books. They are pretty much post WW2, English, old country houses and village type books. (I also enjoy Agatha Christies and Mary Roberts Rinehart, and they remind me a lot of those too!)

Consulting Miss Silver seems to be tantamount to asking to be murdered. As in several of her other cases, Miss Silver is approached by a person who wishes her help. The next thing she knows the person's murder is headlined in the paper.This is a not too shabby locked room mystery. The locked room is a windowless annex to a country club (once the murderee's private home). It has one door for which there are only two keys, one in the possession of the owner, the other in the hands of his secretary. The approach to the annex is along a glassed in corridor that is lighted at night so that any person using that route may be seen. Yet one day Lewis Brading is found dead in the annex and it seems that only one man could have murdered him. However Miss Silver is there to make sure that the guilty and not the innocent suffer. Nice collection of eccentrics, interesting post WWII milieu. Pretty good mystery.

In the Rejected Client Variation of the classical Silver format, Maud Silver's first interview with her prospective client opens the book without the usual preliminary skirmishes between the various suspects-to-be. Louis Brading believes that someone has been doping him to make him sleep heavily - possibly to get at his collection of historic jewels, most of which have some connection with crime. He isn't married, although he's courting someone, and his only heir is his cousin, Charles Forrest. Brading has a mean streak; for instance, his secretary, James Moberly, stays with him under threat of exposure of his involvement in jewel thefts long ago (he'd quit if Brading would release him). Frankly, doing time in prison rather than as Brading's secretary might have been easier; a prison sentence for theft is finite, and the worst has actually happened, rather than being kept hanging over one's head. Miss Silver refuses to take the job of spying on Moberly, since it isn't her line, and advises Brading to release Moberly.Charles Forrest, for his part, isn't interested in the collection for itself, but did manage to mysteriously acquire enough cash to renovate his house. Only his adopted sister Lilias lives with him - he divorced Stacy Mainwaring for desertion a few years ago. Stacy, for her part, has avoided Charles and Ledshire for years, but on taking a lucrative job of painting a miniature of the formidable Myra Constantine, learns too late that Myra is staying in Louis Brading's old house-turned-country club - next door to Charles Forrest.Louis Brading, of course, is the murder victim - he of the money and vengeful temperament. The question is, who killed him? Anybody who crossed him might well kill him in a kind of self-defense, although the law wouldn't see it that way. Lilias is a chronic liar and troublemaker - did she try to mess up Brading's engagement, as she might have sabotaged her brother's marriage? Was Charles hard up for money? Or did James Moberly finally snap?