MURDER COMES TO CALL

An upcoming census upends life in the quiet village of Walmsley Parva.

As conventional English ladies will, Edwina Davenport frets endlessly about how to report her unconventional household on her census form. It’s bad enough that she shares her ancestral home, The Beeches, with Beryl Helliwell, an American aviatrix and world traveler. Worse, since Helliwell and Davenport, the inquiry agency she and Beryl run, is barely solvent, the two women rely on subsidies from their gardener, Simpkins, who inherited a fortune from the Colonel Kimberly’s Condiment Company. In recognition of his contribution to the household economy, Beryl installs the irascible and often intoxicated Simpkins in a back bedroom. As Edwina wonders how to describe their platonic ménage-a-trois on their census form, new challenges arise. Soon after Beryl persuades the aging Simpkins to subcontract the physical work of gardening to Irish immigrant Declan O’Shea, O’Shea falls under suspicion of murdering village magistrate Gordon Faraday, who sentenced him to a whopping fine for disorderly conduct. While Edwina and Beryl are trying informally to clear their undergardener, someone steals the messenger bag containing all of Walmsley Parva’s census forms. Fearing reprisals from the pro-union, anti-government Triple Alliance, census officer Gerald Melton hires Helliwell and Davenport to discover the thief. Now Edwina faces an ethical challenge: How hard should she try to recover a set of documents she’d just as soon leave missing?

In this clash between conscience and convention, hilarity wins.