Book Review : A Frothy Mix of Standard Ingredients for Murder

Death in the Andamans by M. M. Kaye (St. Martin’s Press: $14.95).

Long before M. M. Kaye was an eminent author of historical novels, she was a struggling young painter in England, sustaining herself by writing children’s books and murder mysteries, expecting to abandon those projects as soon as her art became lucrative. When she received a small advance on the books, she impulsively sailed off to India at the invitation of a friend whose father was chief commissioner of the Andaman Islands, an outpost consisting of several minuscule dots in the Bay of Bengal.

Port Blair, the largest of the Andamans, had been a penal colony for almost a century, inhabited by paroled Burmese murderers and their families; some of them farmers but most working as clerks and servants for the British Colonial Administration, which required a great many of both. The colonials played golf and tennis, browsed through back issues of Country Life and sipped gin fizzes in the increasingly tiresome company of each other. All in all, the Andamans must have seemed a perfect place for a classic locked- room mystery; the essential difference only that Ross was a remote island, reachable only by ferry.

Concocting the Plot

When a fierce tropical storm effectively cut Ross and its few inhabitants off from the mainland, Kaye and her friend amused themselves by concocting the basic plot of the book that would later appear in England as “Night on the Island” and has now resurfaced here as “Death in the Andamans.” As might be expected in a novel originally written as a lark nearly half a century ago, “Death in the Andamans” is quaintly conventional, with stock characters pulled from the capacious Foreign Service grab bag, dialogue heavily sprinkled with the upper-class slang of the 1930s, and the exotic landscape breathlessly described. In addition to the commissioner himself, a fine example of Anglo-Saxon virtues, there are two appealing young men, Charles Corbet-Carr, fiance of the heroine’s hostess Valerie, and Nicholas Tarrant, the young naval officer who immediately engages the affections of our visiting Copper Randal.

The rest of the group includes Ruby Stock, the island vamp; her wimpy husband Leonard; a small assortment of military attaches, a few dull girls who pose no competition for Copper and Valerie, and the grossly unpleasant copra planter John Shilto and his ferret-faced cousin Ferrers. The Shiltos have not been on speaking terms since John sold Ferrers an inferior piece of island property 15 years before. There are also the Burmese servants to consider, reformed cutthroats and their kin.

A Christmas Picnic

This select group is enjoying a Christmas picnic on one of the larger islands when the storm abruptly ends the festivities. Copper, Valerie and their escorts manage to get back to Government House by car and ferry, but several of the others, who have come in boats, must return by sea. In the course of this perilous voyage, the boats capsize and Ferrers Shilto is drowned, a disaster causing no great grief for his cousin John, the prosperous planter who inveigled Ferrers into investing his savings in swampland. When Ferrers’ drowning is discovered to have been the result of a ferocious blow on the head, Copper, Valerie and their beaux attempt to track down his murderer, but before their amateur investigations are under way, the pleasant naval doctor who found the head wound is also killed, an occurrence followed in short order by the staged suicide of John Shilto, an event effectively eliminating the all-too-prime suspect. Now confronted with three murder victims, the eager sleuths temporarily neglect their romances to concentrate upon the case; eventually solving it with the aid of coincidence, good luck, intuition and the unwitting cooperation of the guilty party.

Like the bland summer coolers so popular at the club, “Death in the Andamans” is a frothy cocktail of standard ingredients; equal parts of manners, money, flirtations and nostalgia, spiced by a dash of literary allusion, served up just as the sun sets on the last days of the British Raj.