Murder on the Second Floor by Frank Vosper (Novella a Day in May #1)

I’ve done a few book-a-day projects – for 25 days, for Novella – but they’re all inspired by Novella A Day In May, which Madame Bibi Lophile has done for a few years. And since May was rolling around, I checked to see if she was planning on doing it again in 2022 – she is, and so we are doing the project together! Always fun to do these things in tandem. (I should add, for my own project, that they might not all be novellas – some will be a bit longer, some might be non-fiction or short stories.)

I started off with one of my Project 24 books – Murder on the Second Floor by Frank Vosper. When I wrote about choosing it, I included a largeish section from the beginning of the novel, which really sold it to me:

Meet Sylvia Armitage. She is the heroine of this story. Sylvia is not reclining gracefully in a hammock, attired in a simple gown of flowered muslin, beneath a cherry-laden tree in a quaint, old-world garden. Neither is she sitting on a table, swinging her long, slim, graceful legs, with a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in a long holder in the other, saying shocking things about biological urges to a horrified aunt. She is not even in a notorious night-club in New York, standing on a table, attired in less than half a bathing-dress, with a gentleman’s silk hat at a rakish angle on her wicked little head, drinking her own health – in such liberal potations as must seriously impair it – surrounded by fifty intoxicated lovers in paper hats, carrying a dozen balloons apiece. No; at the risk of opening our story in a drab and disappointing manner, the truth must be told. Sylvia Armitage is washing-up. Yes, washing-up, in the scullery in the basement of a most ordinary boarding-house in a most ordinary street in Bloomsbury.

There are splashes of this same wit throughout, though there is also plenty of melodrama and it’s hard to know which is intended to be taken more seriously. I suppose both are ingredients of Golden Age murder mysteries, for that is what Murder on the Second Floor is – the action takes place in a boarding house (hurrah for boarding house novels!) run by Sylvia’s parents. There is a maid who is fairly useless, residents ranging from a timid old lady to a florid travelling salesman to a playwright with whom Sylvia is evidently in love, and a handful of others. One of them will, of course, end up dead – though it doesn’t happen for much of the book.

The whole thing rattles along enjoyably, and at rather a dizzying speed so that Vosper could probably have written a book twice the length without any detriment to the pacing. It’s always relatively obvious who did the murder, at least to anybody who has read any other detective novels – though there is a neat twist towards the end that you’ll either enjoy or resent.

What lifts Murder on the Second Floor above the pacey nonsense (that it undoubtedly is) is Vosper’s style. He is funny, observant, and manages to make the charming characters charming. He’s a bit less successful with the characters we’re meant to dislike, who are drawn rather cartoonishly, and there are racist and classist elements to the novel which aren’t surprising but are off-putting. If you can swallow this, it’s an entertaining way to spend a couple of hours.

And a couple of hours entertainment were what plenty of people had from this in the period – since Vosper also wrote a play of the same name. The playwright in the book is writing a play called Murder on the Second Floor, so it all ties together nicely. What I haven’t been able to ascertain is whether the play or the novel came first, and how closely the plots align. Perhaps I should try to track down one of the two films that were made of it… I haven’t even been able to establish the date, since there is no copyright page and library holdings seem to just be the acting edition of the play.  Perhaps the most sophisticated mystery is the book itself?