Why Shoot a Butler? (by Georgette Heyer)

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Although I’ve been reading - and re-reading - Georgette Heyer’s historical romance novels for around forty-five years, off and on, I only discovered her crime/detective novels in 2003. There are twelve of them and I managed to acquire them all over some years. At the start of this year I decided to re-read them (other than one which I did not like at all). I’m reading them in publication order and have just finished ‘Why shoot a butler?’

I had quite forgotten that in addition to reading this book aloud to my sons in April 2003, I re-read it (to myself) as recently as July 2016. But I had entirely forgotten the story and the characters too. I quite like it when that happens since it feels as if I’m reading something for the first time.

Frank Amberley is the main protagonist of this story, and since it was written in the 1930s as a contemporary novel, there’s a lot of formality - so he’s known for most of the book as Mr Amberley, other than to his relatives. He is in his large and rather flashy car (for the era) on his way to stay with his aunt, uncle and cousin when he comes across a vehicle with a rather distressed young woman standing next to it. Inside is a man who has been shot. We soon learn that he is the butler of the title, an innocuous kind of man, and the police cannot work out who could possibly have any motivation for the shooting.

Mr Amberley reports the incident, but does not mention the young woman. This is partly because he does not trust the local police, and since he is convinced she didn’t do the shooting, he wants to protect her. Not that she particularly appreciates it. The young woman is called Shirley Brown, and she lives in a cottage with her brother Mark who has a tendency to get very drunk and somewhat disorderly…

The plot is quite complex, but Heyer always had a tremendous gift for characterisation, so I didn’t find it difficult remembering who was whom. Amberley’s aunt Marion is a delightfully astute woman, her daughter Felicity rather excitable, with a somewhat morbid interest in crime. Amberley himself is a barrister, but we learn that he recently helped the local police to solve another puzzle, so although they don’t all like him much, they accept his assistance in trying to track down the perpetrator.

Except that it’s not that simple. The butler is not the only victim, as the novel progresses. And there are several rather suspicious characters. When I read this before I couldn’t work out what was going on, but by the end there’s really only one likely culprit, so the eventual unmasking comes as no surprise. Perhaps I did have some subconscious memory of my last reading of the book, since events fell into place reasonably well, although there’s a lot of detail about the motivations for the various crimes - and there are many - which I don’t think I could possibly have guessed from the plot.

There are one or two places where I chuckled at the repartee between Amberley and one of his friends - Heyer was so good at that kind of thing. But it occurred to me that her excellent characterisation is possibly a disadvantage in crime fiction, since I felt as if I knew most of the cast… and it was obvious that many of them could not possibly have been involved, due to their integrity and general decency. Other crime fiction of this era has rather more two-dimensional characters, so that it’s quite feasible that an unlikely one might end up the culprit.

Still, overall I thought this an enjoyable, fast-paced book with some very tense scenes towards the end. Definitely recommended if you like light crime in this genre, but don’t expect a mystery that could be solved if only you noticed all the clues. Even when the details are spelled out towards the end, I don’t think I could possibly have worked them out myself, even in my third time of reading.

Review copyright 2022 Sue's Book Reviews