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The Trouble With Harriet

by Dorothy Cannell

What is it with the English, anyway?
When I come across an English writer who is otherwise very good at relating their story, (Dick Francis comes to mind as well as Dorothy Cannell in The Trouble With Harriet) but whose characters sustain even the grossest insult or attack with only the equivalent of a shrug or a smile, I have to wonder if the English people as a whole are more accepting, more forgiving or just more submissive. Faced with certain of the fictional situations I've read, the average American would most assuredly respond with either a vicious retort, actual physical violence, or have the offending individual placed under police or psychiatric care. The English, however, seem almost to expect being trod upon!

Make no mistake – I love Dorothy Cannell, even though all her work isn't equally that good. She tends at times to populate her books with too many characters, and after a promising start, the plot just dissolves. But here (and in most cases)her writing is funny while she manages to weave a mystery that's equally entertaining. The Trouble With Harriet may not quite meet the expectations derived from Dorothy Cannell novels such as The Thin Woman, or God Save The Queen. I would advise any reader new to Ms. Cannell to begin with one of those.

The Trouble With Harriet (naturally being a takeoff on Hitchcock's 'The Trouble With Harry') starts off with the usual protagonist of Dorothy Cannell novels, Ellie Haskell (an interior decorator) with her husband Ben planning a well-deserved vacation in France. Ellie is warned by a gypsy fortune-teller, however, that such a trip would end in disaster. Their plans are further disrupted at the last moment by the arrival of Ellie's seldom-heard-from, world-traveling father, Morley Simons, clutching an urn which supposedly contains the remains of his beloved Harriet. It seems that Harriet was only a briefly a companion before she died in a car accident, but it was love at first sight for Ellie's Daddy. Harriet evidently returned that love. The father has now come to England only because he 's promised to give the urn over to Harriet's relatives, although he seems very reluctant to relinquish the ashes of his former lover.

Sub-plots woven into the story, and ultimately vital to its conclusion, are those of Cousin Freddy and his kleptomaniac mother Aunt Lulu, Mrs. Malloy, Ellie and Ben's housekeeper, a young titled woman (Lady Grizwold) with her elderly wealthy husband the Lord, and Dunstan Ambleforth - a dotty old vicar so obviously senile the reader can't help but wonder why he wasn't put out to pasture long ago. In addition to this strange cast of characters is the vicar's wife, Kathleen Ambleforth, a redoubtable character who has both written and is directing a play, Murder Most Fowl, for the benefit of her husband's parish, St. Anselm's. Many of the locals have parts in this production, including some of those listed above.

In due course it becomes evident that the urn holds something other than Harriet's remains – but it isn't what you're led to believe. The convoluted plot brings in Morley Simon's former landlady from Germany, an elusive Mr. Price who seems to be a spy, a German priest, and involves a church in the German town of Loetzinn. One of the final scenes depicts the dress rehearsal of Murder Most Fowl, its devastating conclusion, and the subsequent apprehension of Harriet's murderers as opposed to the 'accident' she was supposed to have suffered.

If you can stomach the fact that in The Trouble With Harriet the vicar continually commits outrageous acts with no reprisals and only affectionate admission, then you'll be free to appreciate the rest of this particular murder mystery – with a murder which isn't even discovered until late in the story. Perhaps English readers will find vicar Dunstan
Ambleforth's antics amusing. Perhaps, too, I speak for most American readers when I find
them infuriating instead. It's to be fervently hoped that Dorothy Cannell will keep such literary characters divorced from her main plots in the future. The Trouble With Harriet, however, is well worth your time.


Alan Paul Curtis

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