It’s time to get your Maple on! Or is that Marple?
It is, in fact, Marple, but in the gloriously funny sleuthing world of loaded-to-the-gills heiress Indigo-Daisy-Violet-Amber-Hasluck-Royce-Jones-Bombberg, what passes for classic detective work, and classic detectives of the Agatha Christie kind for that matter, are played fast and loose with in the pursuit of truth, justice and a personally styled Sydney way.
Calling the Australian harbour city home – although she has homes across the globe naturally – Indigo, “helped” by her independently minded and sassy to the core PA of sorts Esmerelda, who is also a reluctant cover girl and eager consumer of sugar-laden goods, has had better days, all of them explored with vivacious wit and with a sparklingly wry writing style in Murder Most Fancy.
Sure, she still has her Jimmy Choos, a luscious head of hair, and the attention of a hunky police detective, a lecherous rich playboy and the handsome brother of her now-dead husband, but well, she has a dead husband, who ended up catching on fire thanks to activities that were very much not on the right side of the law.
Detailed in the previous novel Heiress on Fire – if you haven’t read the preceding novel, as this reviewer had not, never fear; Kellie McCourt does an exemplary job of weaving in salient parts of this novel without bogging down Murder Most Fancy in expository in-filling – Indigo pretty much lost it all, fabulous wealth excluded notwithstanding thank god, her reputation dragged through the dirt to such a comprehensively embarrassing extent that she can barely show her face at the spa.
“While Dylan took his third phone call, I rose, motioning towards the bathrooms. Dylan gave me his trademark grin and sexy nod-wink combination. He was a very good-looking guy with zero morals who did absolutely nothing for me.
This made me very happy. I had depth! Who knew? (P. 226)
For all her privilege, Indigo has been through the mill, and it is only the support of her tough-as-nails grandmother, in whose poolhouse she lives and whose paintings she, ahem, borrows, and the maternal love of her grandmother’s kindhearted neighbour and BFF Dame Elizabeth Holly, that has got her through.
This is one heiress, who is surprised to find she had emotional depth and moral centre – the point at which that realisation strikes her is yet another vibrantly amusing moment in a novel stacked to the gilt-edged rafters with them – and who could really catch a break.
Alas, when out in her grandmother’s garden one Sunday afternoon, attracted by the sound of her ex-classmate berating her gardener – Bettina, like most of the Holly family, bar Elizabeth and her younger queer son Astor, are Not Very Nice People – Indigo trips over a dead body, the latest wholly unpleasant episode in a day filled with totally justifiable felonies, the reignition of a childhood feud, and romantic embarrassment.
Not her finest hour, after a year full of them, so you can well understand why Indigo, who can somehow swish around in designer gear while quaffing McDonald’s Happy Meals, is a tad reluctant to heed the urging of her grandmother and Dame Elizabeth to find out who the mysterious dead man in the garden is, and where, and surely this is not related, where Elizabeth’s missing septuagenerian beau might have got to,
But investigate Indigo and Esmerelda, who possesses the street smarts and bravura that Indigo sometimes lacks, must, impelled by a grandmother’s relentless pushing and Indigo’s palpable affection for Dame Lizzy as she calls her (Bettina, you won’t be surprised to learn, hates the abbreviation) for whom she would do just about anything.
What follows over the 400-plus pages of Murder Most Fancy, which never once overstays it frothily buoyant welcome, is a murder mystery that is equal parts Lucille Ball slapstick, rom-com fabulousness and witty farce writ large, all of it given vivaciously comedic life by characters who shimmer and shine, dialogue that glitters on the page with perfectly-placed bon mots and a plot that has intrigue but also a great deal of judiciously exercised silliness that is never less than inordinately clever.
Much like any ABBA song, which are far more complex than many people give it credit for, Murder Most Fancy is a brilliantly concocted riff on a murder mystery, all building clues and occasional red herrings, that is stitched together by Indigo and Esmerelda’s sometimes inept but often inspired Poirot-ness, all delivered with fancy champagne, Palm Beach views and private plane rides with a staff to make all the sleuthing as luxurious as it can possibly be.
Infused throughout this bubbling burst of criminal-busting derring-do, where handsome men constantly unwittingly, and sometimes wittingly truth be told, try to test Indigo’s resolve to take life and crime solving seriously, is a wittily sarcastic taking down of the established order.
Sure, Indigo is part and parcel of said order but thanks to her legal troubles of late, and the social opprobrium they have brought in their wake, she is also now a figure curiously on the outer, affording her a vantage point which McCourt uses to wonderfully entertaining and archly critical advantage.
“The moment the maid was out of earshot, Grandmother rounded on me. ‘ Elizabeth had better come out of this smelling of roses,’ she warned. ‘If that’s not going to be the case, you can stop right now and forget everything you have found. [Name redacted] could still be a nameless homeless man.’
‘She will,’ I responded without hesitation. ‘Absolutely. Roses.’
There was no certainty of that, but it was rather liberating to oppose Grandmother’s will with such conviction.
‘Are you lying to me, Indigo?’
‘No,’ I lied. (P. 400)
If you love your crime with more than a layer of wit, wisdom and upper class skewering, then you will adore just about everything about Murder Most Fancy.
Inspired title aside, whose origin is explained in the book’s closing chapters in a most satisfying, and naturally highly amusing way, this is a novel that soars on the heady wordplay afforded to its hilariously likeable protagonist who may be pampered and privileged but who also wants to do the right thing (in the right clothes of course), and who is surrounded by a supporting cast so alive in their own self-centred and occasionally altruistic ways that they breathe endlessly charming, laugh-worthy life into a narrative that is as much social commentary, wittily delivered, as it is mystery solving.
There’s a great deal going in the rarefied suburbs and socially correct climes of Sydney society and McCourt brings it all to technicolour rom-com, comedy gold life in Murder Most Fancy.
The novel is diverting and escapist and ridiculously funny but also inspired and clever, a murder mystery that is all about connecting the dots, righting wrongs, all written in ways so vividly rich and burstingly alive that you will be laughing all the way to the big pay off at the end which is, happily for those who like justice served in suitably dramatic gotcha fashion, is all Christie-esque but with an appealingly sense of fun all its own that will have you hanging in there every last tantalising clue-dropped part of the way to justice which is served with the required amount of the baddies getting their just desserts and by a protagonist who, let’s face it, most definitely deserves that new pair of shows she will inevitably buy to celebrate her triumph.