The Grenadillo Box [Hardcover]

The Grenadillo Box is Janet Gleeson first foray into novel writing, her last two books, The Arcanum and The Moneymaker, were Coditude-style micro-histories of porcelain and the inventor of paper money. Gleeson has not completely abandoned the past, however; this is an atmospheric 18th-century whodunnit. It begins à la Agatha Christie with a mysterious death in a library and eventually concludes, in true Poirot fashion, with our detective explaining his deductions in the very same library. (A further ingenious genealogical twist is reserved until the final pages.)

Nathaniel Hopson, a journeyman to the great cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale, is employed to install a new library in Horsehearth Hall, the Cambridgeshire seat of the cantankerous Lord Montfort. On the evening of its completion the obnoxious Montfort is found dead. His corpse is covered in leeches but he appears to have been shot and an elegantly carved wooden box lays by his side. With vast gambling debts it is assumed that he has committed suicide to prevent his creditor Lord Foley gaining control of the estate. Hobson (and Foley) are not so sure. After stumbling on the mutilated corpse of his colleague John Partridge (the man who designed the library) in a frozen pond nearby, Hobson is convinced Montfort was murdered. Could Partridge, a foundling, have had some claim to Montfort's fortune? How are Partridge, Montfort, Chippendale and Foley all connected to the Italian actress Madame Trenti? And just why is Chippendale so desperate to recover a series of drawings from Montfort's library? Although loosely based on real incidents and bolstered with plenty of authentic detail (Gleeson was a once a Sotheby's antique expert) this novel often resorts to some fairly hoary melodramatic conceits along the way. Hobson and cohorts, for example, seem to discover an extraordinary number of conveniently illuminating long lost letters. The dialogue doesn't always ring true, though there are a pleasing smattering of "I was a lusty one and twenty years" and more than a couple of wonderfully bawdy Boswell-isms. Despite its flaws this is still an immensely enjoyable historical detective yarn. --Travis Elborough

An 18th century who-dunnit from the bestselling author of The Arcanum and The Moneymaker.

'Full of Chippendale-style hidden compartments, concealed latches and trick mirrors, her narrative is absolutely enchanting.'

'Delivers bite after bite of murder, mystery and intrigue . . . a richly flavoured, full-bodied, 18th century whodunit.'

A supremely accomplished and richly imagined historical whodunnit from the bestselling author of THE ARCANUM and THE MONEYMAKER. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

It all starts with a body in the library. When Lord Montford is discovered shot, sprawled on the floor of his newly completed library, his faithful hound dead at his feet, a mystery is uncovered, the answer to which has its origins thirty years in the past. Nathaniel Hopson, journeyman for Thomas Chippendale, the famous English furniture designer, and the man who built Montford's sumptuous library, is the first on the scene. Within hours another body is discovered, that of Nathaniel's closest friend John Partridge, his hands badly mutilated. How is it that a Lord of the realm and a cabinetmaker's assistant should both be found dead on the same night, both in suspicious circumstances? Nathaniel is set on a course as the reluctant detective, driven to discover the truth of his friend's mysterious death and his connection with the murder of Lord Montford. In The Grenadillo Box Janet Gleeson has produced a detective story as intricately crafted as a Chippendale cabinet, a gripping story which brings to dramatic life the world of the Eighteenth century.

It is New Year's Day 1755 and Nathaniel Hopson, journeyman to the famous cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale, finds himself drawn into a chilling affair. While working at the country home of Lord Montfort, Nathaniel discovers his patron shot dead in his magnificent new library. The conclusion is obvious: Montfort burdened with gambling debts and recently possessed of a melancholic nature, must have taken his own life.

Nathaniel, however, is not convinced. The gun near Montfort's hand suggests suicide, but what of the blood on the windowsill and the confusion of footprints on the library floor? And there is another strange detail: Lord Montfort was found clutching a small and elaborately carved box of grenadillo wood. Does the answer to this most baffling of mysteries lie within this unusual keepsake?

No sooner has Nathaniel been set up as a most unlikely investigator than another body is found, frozen and cruelly mutilated. Nathaniel's detachment is shattered. He knows the victim well - but what was he doing on Montfort's country estate? Nathaniel's investigation will take him from the drawing rooms of the aristocracy to the slums of Fleet Street and the archives of London's Foundling Hospital, where the identity of a child abandoned twenty years ago may hold the key to the grenadillo box. But someone has already killed to keep this secret and each step Nathaniel takes on his journey is a step further into danger.

A powerful fiction début, The Grenadillo Box is a gripping detective story as intricately crafted as a Chippendale cabinet of curiosities. Janet Gleeson has recreated a vibrant eighteenth-century England rich in period detail. The bustling workshop of Thomas Chippendale and the intrigues of Georgian society provide the vivid backdrop to this compelling murder mystery.

Janet Gleeson was born in Sri Lanka, where her father was a tea planter. After taking a degree in History of Art and English she joined Sotheby's, and later worked for Bonhams Auctioneers. She has written for House and Garden, The Antique Collector, Country Life and Apollo. In 1991 she joined Reed Books, where she was responsible for devising and writing Miller's Antiques and Collectibles. She is the author of the Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller The Arcanum and The Moneymaker. Janet Gleeson lives in London.

Clumsiness rather than cleverness marked the starting point. To put it another way, the discovery happened after two blunders.
It was New Year’s Day, 1755, in the midst of Lord Montfort’s dinner when I stumbled first. The platter I was serving tipped and sent a pyramid of oranges madly spinning over the Turkey carpet. Puce with self-consciousness, I squatted to gather them up, threading my way between a forest of silk-stockinged and mahogany legs. But I needn’t have worried; no one had noticed. They were ablaze with alarm at the cause of my slip – a deafening gun blast that had rudely interrupted their party.
The eight people assembled in that room must each have recognized that the source of the sound was close by, in this very house most likely, perhaps in the very next room. It had reverberated through the building, a truly deafening noise, made more ear-splitting perhaps by its unexpectedness; loud enough to make the door shudder and the glass in the window frames rattle; loud enough to ring in my ears several minutes afterwards.
What did it signify? From where had the explosion emanated? For reasons I didn’t comprehend, these questions were written in their faces yet remained unspoken. They cried out, pressing hands to their ears as if to ward off the penetrating sound, but none of them went straight to the nub of the matter. None asked the most obvious question. What had become of their host, Lord Montfort?
The gentlemen strode stiffly about the room or sat erect in their chairs. One (I know not whom, for I was still scrabbling on the floor at this juncture) cried out the only question to which the response was already evident. ‘What in God’s name was that?’

‘A gunshot.’
‘A gunshot, you say?’
‘Aye, a gunshot . . .’
In her husband’s absence, the mistress of this household, Lady Montfort, should perhaps have taken charge. Yet when the other ladies rose rustling and fluttering and squawking, like startled pheasants put up by a beater, she seemed oblivious to her obligations. She turned a ring with her forefinger, cowed and silent, her shoulders twitching with suppressed emotion.
In truth, though I was but a stranger here, I did not think her behaviour peculiar. From the outset Horseheath Hall hadstruck me not only by its air of isolated seclusion – I am well accustomed to city life, and found its remoteness unsettling – but also by its singular character. This was my sixth day in the house; the longer I stayed the more my conviction grew that, for all its studied luxury, the mansion lacked some fundamental quality. Horseheath Hall was devoid of the essential warmth that fuses mere stone and bricks and floors and windows into an entity deserving of the name of home. Its elegant rooms were suffused with shadow. Gilded furnishings and damask draperies and ornaments did not fill the emptiness; nor did sunlight and fires ever warm it.
This oppressive chill seemed also to infect its inhabitants, and in particular its unhappy mistress. Elizabeth Montfort was but a young woman, of perhaps two and twenty years, yet there was no youthful gaiety about her, no liveliness, no freedom of expression or spirit. As far as I had observed, her habitual manner was one of suppressed anxiety and unusual agitation. Her complexion was wan, her face pinched, her eyes pale blue and rather prominent, which only added to her fretful expression. Over the past days, whenever I caught sight of her, whether penning a letter or stitching her embroidery or going listlessly about the house, it seemed to me she started, as if my appearance was somehow fearsome to her.
This evening that nervousness worsened when her husband’s temper grew markedly capricious. His final choleric outburst had caused all vestige of composure to desert her. When he stalked from the room her face turned parchment pale. Afterwards she sat clenching the tablecloth as if terrified to the depths of her soul that at any moment he might burst back and berate her again.
It was Lord Foley, senior guest at the present assembly, who swiftly took command. He instructed all servants to be sent in search of the source of the sound. When I lingered on (not regarding myself as a servant I didn’t feel obliged to follow his direction), my inertia was swiftly remarked; whereupon he clicked his fingers, furrowed his caterpillar brows and ordered me away as curtly as one might command a dog to follow a scent.
Unable to refuse such a command, I bowed with suitable deference, then turned tail so swiftly I reckon I surprised him. But why dawdle when it was plain to me where to go? Naturally Lord Foley wasn’t aware then who he was ordering about, that I was in a sense an impostor here, or that there was only one room in the house that concerned me. Lord Montfort’s new library was where I headed.