As summer winds down and fall inches closer, it’s starting to feel more and more like cozy reading season. And for me, there’s nothing cozier than curling up with a good traditional mystery / crime novel. Where summer is a time for travel and adventure, fall is the season of settling and community. So when I read about A Curtain-Twitcher’s Book of Murder, it felt like the perfect fit for August. (US readers – this is a UK import, I’m afraid. This blog is drawing me to become increasingly familiar with the Waterstones site…)

A Curtain-Twitcher’s Book of Murder is a voyeuristic look at Atbara Avenue, a seemingly placid suburban London street. Each of the inhabitants is struggling with an interpersonal issue. And while those issues can be tackled the “hard” way, murder is a seemingly expedient solution. Each chapter is a short vignette following an inhabitant as they flirt with the idea of death on purpose. It’s a refreshing take on crime – a little like the reading version of playing Overboard!. And – perhaps weirdly for a story full of so much aggression – reading it made me nostalgic for a pre-Internet era, when mysteries were both easier and harder to hide.

A criminal perspective – and a detection focus

Unlike a typical crime author, Gay Marris makes the intriguing choice to center the murderers and their decision-making processes. Instead of watching a detective unravel means, motive, and opportunity ex post, we read along with the criminals in real-time. Each chapter takes on a sense of suspense as you try to figure out how the events end in death. It’s the closest I’ve felt to being Miss Marple in the middle of a story – a fascinating reading experience.

A Curtain-Twitcher’s Book of Murder also stands out for its choice to include several short murder stories. By casting her eye on each of the residents of Atbara Avenue, Marris frames murder as an almost prosaic matter, not a singular one. Each story is linked to the next by at least one character; the vicar and his wife recur across all the chapters. While in a typical crime novel, engaged readers try to eliminate suspects, here the murder is a foregone conclusion. This shifts the core questions from “how did it happen?” to “why and when will this be possible?” Given the diverse cast of residents, and a wide range of motives, A Curtain-Twitcher’s Guide to Murder feels almost like a detective’s sampler of criminal case studies.

Marris’s narrative style enhances the case study feel of these stories. The narration is third-person limited, shifting to focus on different perspective characters. Marris make sure each character’s feelings and motivations are clear, but stops short of endorsing them. Unlike, say, a certain Christie novel, Marris’s structure gives her little time to build true sympathy for these characters. And unlike, say, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, there are no easy outs or justifiable cheats – we’re talking lots of and lots of murder in cold blood. Instead, each chapter lays out the facts and feelings as the POV character sees them, leaving us to make our own judgements of the validity of their reactions. The book is a masterclass in sympathy but not empathy – telling interesting tales without endorsing brutal acts.

A product of the times

In many ways, it’s easier to swallow this premise – a street full of secret murderers – in a story set almost sixty years ago. The pre-Internet era setting adds both mystery and human knowledge to each story. It feels both more and less feasible that none of these neighbors detect each others’ crimes. And it’s more interesting when they notice a human element – something feels wrong – and start to dig in, perhaps misattributing its cause.

Reading A Curtain-Twitcher’s Guide to Murder made me almost nostalgic for the time and the loose interactions that were part of daily life. Yet many of the characters are also stuck on Atbara Street, in a way that technologies like the Internet may have ameliorated. (Not to say there are no lonely spinsters or model-obsessed adult men today, but they have more outlets for connection…) In the same way, a pre-“stranger danger” community, where the neighbors know “enough” about each other to notice when something is wrong feels almost foreign to this modern American reader. There’s a comfort in being familiar enough to a small, almost random community that they notice you’re acting a bit strange.

In this way, A Curtain-Twitcher’s Book of Murder felt both nostalgic and modern. The stories, focused on a small community of folks that know each other much less than they surmise, feel like an apt metaphor for a world rebuilding after a pandemic. We are all surrounded by people we think we know, but who have undergone dramatic change and emotional upheaval. And while (hopefully) few are murderers, many of us have had to ponder life-or-death decisions on an unprecedented magnitude over the last few years. (How long, and how much, should we isolate? When should we reopen schools? Is open-air dining OK? What about indoors?) A Curtain-Twitcher’s Book of Murder was a good reminder that each of us carry multitudes – and while we may not have chosen the same path of actions as another, we can probably understand it.

A neat crime twist

I’m not sure that Gay Marris intended such a metaphor when writing. And if you’re looking simply looking for a compendium of short crime stories, this will do just fine. But I’m in a bit of a ponder-y mood, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to think about my favorite genre a bit differently, and to remember how complex humans can be.

We’ll continue onto that theme with the next installment – more to come on the topic of interesting neighbors soon. Until then, stay cozy, and stay curious!

This will count as my character-driven novel for my 52 Book Club Challenge.