On the opposite end of the crime spectrum we have two rather more genteel mysteries from the early 1950s by Louisa Revell, A Silver Spade and The Kindest Use a Knife. Revell was born Ellen Hart Smith, the only child of a furniture store owner and a schoolteacher. She wrote seven mysteries featuring retired-teacher Miss Julia Tyler, and as Curt Evans points out in his introduction, no one in her home town had any idea she was a published author!
As A Silver Spade begins, Miss Julia is offered a part-time teaching job. She refuses the job at first, until she discovers that there are “threatening letters” involved. She is intrigued. Which is how she ends up teaching Latin at a high I.Q. all-girls’ summer school at Camp Pirate Island in Maine. Miss Tyler is welcomed by the faculty, where she starts making new friends—while passing judgement on a few others. One of the latter is Captain Benesch, the riding master. Could he be the threatening letter writer? With his cold black eyes, he is certainly not someone she’d like to meet on a lonely bridle path in the dead of night. But one night a shot rings out, and on just such a path, Captain Benesch is found dead, shot through the heart. And now Miss Julia, like it or not, is right in the thick of another mystery.
The Kindest Use a Knife finds Miss Julia back home in Rossville, Virginia, where she soon becomes embroiled in another dispute when her church becomes divided over the occupancy of their parish house. Evelyn Morris, with her daughter and invalid son, have lived there for years. But now a new member of the church, the rich and influential Mr. Riley, wants to remove the Morrises and renovate the building. But Evelyn is intractable. This is her home, and she intends to stay. Then tragedy strikes when Evelyn is found with a knife in her back. Suspects abound, from Miss Julia’s best friend, Adelaide, to busybody Vergie Nelson, to Mrs. Stevens, president of the Guild, right up to Mr. Riley and the Reverend Mr. Vail himself!
As J. F. Norris wrote about Revell’s sleuth in his Pretty Sinister Books blog: “Julia is perhaps the epitome of what an amateur detective should be in fiction. Having no real encounter with real crime but relying only on the fanciful stories of mystery writers she follows the tenets and practices of her favorite characters.” Seventy-five years after they were first published, the Julia Tyler mysteries are still feisty fun. We reprinted the first two in the series—The Bus Station Murders and No Pockets in Shrouds—this time last year. We highly recommend you check them out.
