Winter is coming fast, and it’s time to abandon the garden for a warm fire and a pile of cozy mysteries. I’d feel that way even if the deer had not broken in and eaten everything this year. I tell myself they were just saving me on cutting back the plants for winter. So in that spirit, how about a garden writer who also had a taste for penning just the kind of novels you’d like to curl up in front of a flickering fireplace?
Beverley Nichols was a typical British Bright Young Thing. Leaving Oxford after only one term to join the war effort in 1917, he returned after the Armistice to become President of the Oxford Union and editor of Isis, a literary magazine. His autobiographical novel Patchwork, which is in the Byrdcliffe library, describes this experience. Ironic and jaded, it captures the ennui of a generation destroyed by war, but it can be heavy going.
Nichols then turned to the kind of career enjoyed by a not-particularly-closeted mid-century gay man. He is best remembered for his books about his homes and gardens, chronicling first his struggles to maintain a Tudor thatched cottage, then an urban house and garden in London, next, a Georgian manor, and finally an 18th-century Surrey cottage. Populated by such characters as Oldfield, his taciturn gardener, the books balance poetic sensitivity with Wildean wit, and were so popular that they led to numerous parodies, including R. J. Yeatman‘s character, “Knatchbull Twee.”
But Nichols was no stranger to controversy. In 1933, he published Cry Havoc, a pacifist condemnation of the connection between government and the armaments industry, stating, “chivalry was a flower too fine to blossom on the poisoned fields of Flanders.” As openly gay as anyone could be at the time, Nichols became an advocate for sexual tolerance, particularly in his work of the early 1930s, when he met and began living with his lifelong partner, Cyril Butcher. One of Nichols’s most scandalous publications, Father Figure (1972), recounts his three attempts to murder his abusive alcoholic father, and led to calls for his prosecution.
His five mysteries are undeservedly difficult to track down. They feature Horatio Green, a portly detective whose overdeveloped sense of smell enables him to solve cases. In The Moonflower (1955), Nichols second mystery, Horatio Green finds himself on Dartmoor, where a rare moonflower, cultivated by the rapacious collector, Mrs. Faversham, is about to bloom. In Murder by Request (1960), Green is enjoying retirement, having fulfilled his life’s ambition of having an electrically operated garden fountain, when he is called to spend Christmas at a health spa by Sir Owen Kent, whose life has been threatened. The mystery in the latter book is a bit obvious, but The Moonflower has a genuinely nifty means of murder, rooted, so to speak, in Nichols’ lifelong passion for gardening. And my copy of Murder by Request offers a neat mystery of its own, in the form of the inscription on the flyleaf dated Nov. 2, 1960: “To Gladys, from her ‘New York Boyfriend,’ Jack L.”
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