M. C. Beaton. Death of a Nag. Warner, 1995.
Death of a Nag is an earlier Hamish Macbeth mystery. (For followers of Hamish, he still has Towser, so this is before Lugs.) These are murder mysteries told in a tone of humor and good cheer. Macbeth has been demoted and he and Priscilla have agreed to call off their wedding. The combination has left the tongues of Lochdubh wagging about their resident policeman. Macbeth thinks it is time to take a vacation.
He travels across Scotland to an inn in the village of Skag on the North Sea. Readers know from the beginning who is going to get murdered because of the book’s title. There is only one nag in the story, and by the time he is knocked off, we understand that nobody likes him.
Unlike many of the Hamish Macbeth stories, this is for all practical purposes a closed room mystery like the kind that Agatha Christie popularized. There are two families and a few other strangers all staying at the inn. Except for family members, it appears no one knows each other, but also no one in the small town knows any of the visitors staying at the inn. One of them has to have killed the nag, but who?
Hamish at one point stops Bob Harris from beating his wife. That gives us a sense of why no one likes Mr. Harris, but it also means that Hamish is a suspect. He told the nag that things would be much worse if he tried beating his wife again.
Some of the humor comes from Miss Gunnery, a retired teacher who latches on to Macbeth and who helps him do some investigating. It is not that she is funny, but that she gets sweet on him even though she is probably twenty-five years his senior.
The local police are annoyed at Macbeth because he is a fellow copper but also a suspect. They appreciate his help with the investigation, but they also assign a young female constable to assist but also to keep an eye on him. Miss Gunnery might be a tad jealous over Maggie.
We begin to realize that the inn’s customers all seem to have something to hide. There may be a reason why they come to this remote village for a holiday. There is a man and woman with three kids. The kids call them Mommy and Daddy, but the couple are not married to each other. There are two young women who prefer clothing that calls attention to their figures—and we learn that they have police records. Another single male guest, retired from the army, seems overly protective of Mrs. Harris. Even the one teenager in the ersatz family says she’s likely to kill Mr. Harris because of some of the things he does.
The plot has a number of surprises. Hamish at one point has to return to Lochdubh, accompanied by the young constable. Some of his investigation takes him to England for a few days. The plot gets more and more complicated, and the story ends with about three plot twists in the last dozen pages.
Once I directed an Agatha Christie play. The script for the film version originally cut out about the last eleven pages so that even the cast would not know the surprises at the ending. Death of a Nag is like that. We are kept guessing right until the end. And even after the crime is solved with only about three pages left, there are still more surprises! Smile.