Customer Reviews

Last Nocturne: A Mystery

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"Last Nocturne," by Marjorie Eccles, is set in Austria and England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Twenty-two year old Grace Thurley, the pretty and independent daughter of a deceased member of the clergy, has decided to break her engagement and become the social secretary of her mother's old friend, Mrs. Edwina Martagon, in London. Grace is ready to leave home and spread her wings. After all, "in a new age when women were climbing mountains in Switzerland and trekking through Africa, anything was possible."

If adventure is what she wants, Grace is not disappointed. When she takes up her new post, she finds a family in upheaval. Edwina is the widow of Eliot Martagon, the owner of an art gallery who, much to the shock of his relatives and friends, apparently committed suicide six months earlier. When the body of an artist who exhibited in Eliot's gallery is also found dead, apparently by his own hand, Oxford-educated Chief Inspector Philip Lamb ("one of the newer breed of policemen") and his colleague, Detective Sergeant Cogan, try to determine what is really behind this pair of untimely deaths.

Eccles enriches her story by moving back and forth in time, showing how events in the past led to the tragedies that followed. In addition, she touches on the crusade for women's rights, anti-Semitism in Vienna, the origins of World War I, and the daring ways in which provocative young artists expressed themselves after the Industrial Revolution. Throughout, Eccles never loses sight of the thoughts and emotions that motivate her large cast of characters, including thirty-year-old Guy Martagon, Eliot's moody and enigmatic son; Mrs. Isobel Amberley, a beautiful widow whose passionate involvement with a married man leads to disaster; and Sophie, an unhappy little girl who is largely ignored by her self-absorbed and wanton mother.

The author's use of figurative language is deliciously evocative. She describes Isobel's feelings this way: "They came, these sensuous, almost unbearable moments of unexpected awareness, like little poisoned darts, sharp enough to pierce the carefully contrived carapace she's built...." "Last Nocturne" satisfies on many levels--as a work of historical and romantic fiction, an engrossing mystery, and an intense psychological study of lives in turmoil.

In 1909 London, a young, promising artist named Theo Benton is found dead after apparently committing suicide. While investigating the death, Detective Philip Lamb and his partner, Sergeant Cogan, soon realize that "apparently" is the key word - Benton was young, in good spirits, and full of promise. Why would he want to end his own life?

While investigating the death, Lamb connects Theo's murder to another suicide. Benton's work was scheduled to appear at an art gallery - and the owner of that gallery, Eliot Martagon, had shot himself a few months prior. It seems too much of a coincidence for both men to have killed themselves withouot a reason, and given that they knew each other, foul play begins to be suspected. It seems that the two met in Vienna two years prior, and the key to unlocking the deaths lies in the Austrian capital.

Isobel Amberley is a young widow who moves to Vienna to pick up the pieces of her life after the death of her husband. Through a friend, Julian Carrington, she rents an apartment next door to that of two artists, Viktor and Bruno Franck. The Franck brothers are unusual - revolutionaries who have an eclectic group of friends and an even more eclectic group of women hanging around. It is through the artists that Isobel meets an aspiring artist, Theo Benton, and an art dealer named Eliot Martagon. Could this woman hold the key to the two deaths? What does she know? And why is she reluctant to talk to the police?

Though it features several jumps in time and a host of characters whose lives are tangled with each other, "The Last Nocturne" is a fast-paced, intriguing read. I found the jumps between years and locales not difficult to follow, and they provided needed information to solve the tale. The mystery is well-written, well-planned, and features likable characters. Though this was my first Eccles book, I'm looking forward to reading more.

In The Last Nocturne, Marjorie Eccles links the deaths of two men to the lives of an aristocratic Edwardian family, her characters treading the foggy streets of central London while also reveling in the art of turn-of-the-century Vienna where impoverished artists eke out a living and love and loss take place in the shadows of an impending war. Despite her mother's better judgment, and her long acquaintance with Edwina Martagon, a letter appears out of the blue from wealthy socialite Edwina Martagon asking if her dearest friend would be prepared to let Grace help her out. Placed in service in Edwina's house in London to assist her with her voluminous correspondence and the details of her extremely bus social life, Grace soon finds herself enveloped in enough a complicated web of secrets and lies centering around the Martagon family.

Although Edwina is preoccupied making preparations for her daughter Dulcie's coming out, she's till devastated over the death of her husband Eliot, an artist manqué, who had hung around the fringes of the art world promoting those more talented than himself. He has recently developed a vested interest in the small and exclusive Pontifex Gallery, just off Bond street. There was never any satisfactory explanation for why Eliot Martagon, a man in excellent health, his life flourishing should have shot himself dead six months ago. He'd left no note and the interests of propriety, a verdict of accidental death while cleaning his gun more acceptable than suicide had eventually been given.

Grace, our eyes and ears and our cipher for much of what goes on in Embury Square. She expected her time there to be plain sailing, although this proves to be a far more elusive concept. Edwina is over bearing and demanding, gravitating between a rigid self-control and sense of loss; while Dulcie harbors a desperate frustrated ambition to be an artist. Grace takes to Dulcie, but she's also caught the attentions of Edwina's son Guy Martagon. Lean, loose-limbed, elegant and moody, Guy is more interested in winding up his father's affairs and of righting the worlds wrongs. An enigmatic personality, he beguiles grace with his exotic adventures in foreign parts that had kept him away from hone for years.

In tight, muscular prose, Eccles shepherds her characters through the early days of their loss before reality catches up with them. Events become even more complicated when Chief Inspector Philip Lamb is called to investigate the apparent suicide of a young man Theo Benton, twenty-five years old, destroyed by his own hand. Theo plummeted to a premature and unnecessary death from a terrace in Adelaide Crescent. A young man at the very height of his success, a painter with a growing reputation, he was also exhibiting his work at the Pontifex gallery and had been working on a series of paintings - nocturnes he called them, similar only in that they were all painted towards dusk, each painted what to the casual eye is nothing but a shadow. For Lamb and his assistant Detective Sergeant Cogan, the crime scene offering up few clues, except an unframed portrait, a conventional study of a child of about eight or nine.

Central to this story is the mystery behind why either man needed to kill himself, Theo by jumping out of the window and Martagon by blowing his brains out. While Eccles' portrait of Edwardian life is important in the Last Nocturne, more striking is the constant heartbeat of Belle Epoch Vienna and that of the forbidden ,heartbreaking love affairs of Isobel Amberly who anxiously watches her lost dreams of the past. Isobel is somehow linked to Theo and Eliot, but she's also linked to Julian Carrington, a banker born with a silver spoon in his mouth and assigned to Vienna. His position and his wealth giving him access to that affluent and fashionable section of Viennese society and he's also too willing to curry favor with the gorgeous Isobel. Yet Isobel also finds herself caught up in the lighthearted vie de boheme of artist brothers Bruno and Viktor Franck; and later the gypsy woman Miriam Koppel and her daughter Sophie whose visions add important layers to the plot.

As Isobel's dramas play out in Vienna, Julian Carrington becomes Eliot's nemesis while back in London, Guy walks the quiet gas-lit streets, his quick impatient stride brooding about how he would ever manage to clear up the mystery of his father's death, which is still confounding him. All is in danger of being exposed when a letter arrives instructing the family solicitor to invest a substantial sum for the support of some child or other. Edwina convinced at a deception, that her husband was all the time aboard leading a double life. The letters mentioning Vienna, but then Edwina confessing she no longer has them, they are lost fallen into unscrupulous hands, and then another letter demanding money for their return. The author races from one character to another, each blindsided by their suspicions, a case of Victorian joyously and forbidden love affairs, bohemian artistic sensibilities are balanced against murder, and the devilish side of human nature is exposed where the power of love is in danger of being destroyed forever. Mike Leonard March 2010.

In 1909, Grace Thurley ends her engagement; leaving Birmingham for London where she has accepted a position as secretary to recently widowed Edwina Martagon and companion to her daughter Dulcie. As she settles into the Martagon household, Edwina's son Guy comes home to settle the estate of his late father, an art gallery owner who committed suicide.

When an artist, whose works were on display at Martagon's gallery, also kills himslef, Scotland Yard revisits the previous case as Chief Inspector Philip Lamb and his assistant Detective Sergeant Cogan find two similar suicides too coincidental and besides no motives existed for either man; one was at the top of his game and the other a rising star. At the same time someone is blackmailing Grace due to love letters her spouse sent to his paramour and that rumors are he sired a child in Vienna two decades earlier. Vienna is where a Mrs. Isobel Amberley seems to be the eye of the hurricane who apparently led to the deaths of the late gallery owner and the deceased artist.

Marjorie Eccles provides her fans with an entertaining Edwardian Era police procedural. The flashbacks of what occurred in Vienna twenty years earlier enable the audience to know why the two men died long before the cops figure out what is going on. The background is terrific as the reader can compare two leading European cities just before and after the turn of the previous century. Although the look back to Vienna is fascinating, but also slows down the present day (1909 that is) mystery. Still this is a fine investigative tale in which Superintendent Gil Mayo would be proud of the efforts of his DS predecessor.

Harriet Klausner