Heron Carvic--Miss Seeton

 Heron Carvic's Miss Seeton mysteries have long been favorites of mine.  Sadly, Carvic wrote only five of them before his death in 1980.  Two other authors, both writing under the name Hamilton Charles, took up the series with the blessing of Carvic's estate; I read several of the subsequent books, but felt they never reached the level of Carvic's witty and humorous writing.  

The heroine of the series is Miss Emily D. Seeton, an unassuming and modest retired art teacher who has inherited a small cottage in the village of Plummergen, Kent, introduced in Picture Miss Seeton.  Before she can take up residence in Kent, however, Miss Seeton, fresh from a performance of Carmen at Covent Garden, stumbles on a young man in an alley striking a woman.  Miss Seeton prods him in the back with the ferule of her umbrella, intending to reprove him for bad manners, but finds instead she has interrupted a murderer at work.  This leads to her meeting Superintendent Delphick of Scotland Yard, who recognizes that while her regular art work is uninspired and somewhat mundane, the quick, cartoonish sketches she does as "notes" contain far more valuable insight, and that Miss Seeton herself is a sort of catalyst for turning an apparently straightforward case into chaos.

In Miss Seeton Draws The Line, Superintendent Delphick, baffled by a series of child murders, asks Miss Seeton to produce a drawing of the latest victim in the hopes that it will give him some insight into the case.  As usual, Miss Seeton inadvertently turns the case upside down, ending with a pitched battle on the streets of Plummergen between the villagers and a motorcycle gang called the Ashford Choppers, and manages to collar the child killer in the process.  

Many of the village locals are convinced that Miss Seeton must be a witch in Witch Miss Seeton on account of her seeming ability to innocently provoke and then escape from dire situations.  Kent has seen an upsurge of interest in witchcraft, and at the same time a strange new cult called Nusience has attracted a number of wealthy people in the area.  Wary of the witchcraft and suspicious that Nusience may be a scam, Superintendent Delphick enlists Miss Seeton to attend a meeting of the latter to gain her impressions of it. And of course, chaos ensues.  

Misled by international press reports of her prowess as a detective, in Miss Seeton Sings the British Foreign Office, overriding protests from Scotland Yard, has sent Miss Seeton to Switzerland to help a bank sort out a massive counterfeiting scheme that threatens to undermine the British economy.  Naturally, Miss Seeton accidentally lands in Italy instead and proceeds to create havoc in half the countries in Europe.  

Odds on Miss Seeton finds her, at the request of Scotland Yard, infiltrating a casino believed to have been taken over by a crooked syndicate to make a drawing of the head of the organization, and later at a horse race where she accidentally affects the outcome of the race and eventually thwarts the syndicate.  

These books are always a pleasure to read, thanks to Heron Carvic's superb writing.  Grade A for all of them.