The Winter Guest

The Winter Guest is a mystery novel set during the Anglo-Irish war, in 1921. From the beginning, it successfully evokes the period, the opening chapter calling up Elizabeth Bowen’s “big house” novels of the era. Weathered old Kilcogan House stands by the sea, enveloped by mist and history and political intrigue. At the start of the story, an ambush and a murder take place there, much of the rest of the book running on the dramatic irony surrounding the latter. To most observers, the killing of the daughter of the house appears to be part of the ambush conducted by an IRA flying column. However, the reader is aware that these are two separate events. Someone came along after the flying column departed, and shot the unconscious woman lying in the car.

Kilcogan House, with its surrounding village, also happens to be a closed environment of the type common in classic mysteries. After a brief interlude in Dublin, the detective Tom Harkin’s milieu, the action centers around the house. The inhabitants of Kilcogan and the locals who surround it clash with each other. In addition to the typical upstairs/downstairs divide in any grand country house like this, factions in the area support either the revolution or the counter-revolution. The Irish big house of this time is an ideal setting for mischief, or worse, because of its embattled quality. By 1921, agitation had raged around such houses for fifty years, starting with the Land League movement of the 1870s and 80s. The Prendeville family, who own Kilcogan, would both try to project power, and fear their tenants and even their own servants, who tend to sympathize with the agitators. As giant symbols of oppression, these houses often went up in smoke during the war.

Harkin can move easily among the different groups in and around the house, because he is a former British soldier now working for the IRA, and because he is an intimate of the Prendevilles. He was previously engaged to the murdered woman, Maud Prendeville. He recognizes something strange about the murder, and immediately questions its connection to the ambush, because Maud is famous for having taken part in the Easter Rising. She is a renegade aristocrat in the mold of Constance Markievicz. So the IRA have no reason to kill her. The local police and their unionist supporters might accuse the rebels of carelessness or spite, but Harkin does not, and therefore has a better vantage point on events. The dramatic irony driving the story highlights his perception and other subtly heroic qualities.

The Winter Guest is an unusual mystery, in that it doubles as a ghost story. Harkin, suffering from shellshock, has a few sightings of what may or may not be Maud’s ghost as he tries to solve her murder. The otherworldly note fits in well with the uncertain tenor of the time and place, and the spookiness of the house.

All in all, the mood of the book is very well done, the mystery breathing life into this period of history. I thought it would appeal to me when I read a short description, and it did not disappoint.