Murder’s A Swine is a light, enjoyable mystery, originally published in 1943. It is well told, has quite engaging protagonists and the early wartime setting is interesting.
The plot...well, it’s pretty silly really. Agnes Kinghof discovers a body in an air-raid shelter and there follow some sinister goings-on involving threats to a neighbour in the form of pig-related apparitions at windows, and so on. Agnes and her husband Andrew are drawn into the investigation, there are some high-jinks and light-hearted badinage and the whole thing is a bit of a romp.
It’s well enough done to carry it off, although some of the husband-and-wife banter isn’t as amusing as it thinks it is and the solution and dénouement are really pretty absurd. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it overall, largely because Agnes is very likeable, some of it is genuinely quite funny and the writing is good. There is the occasional descriptive nugget like this, for example: “The cottages were Tudor, delightful to the tourist, unpleasant for the inhabitant; but the most enthusiastic admirers of rural England do not, as a rule, have to live in it.”
In his interesting introduction, Martin Edwards describes the book as “a cheerful mystery” and says that “To be able to lose oneself in an enjoyable, unserious book is an under-estimated pleasure.” I agree and I can recommend Murder’s A Swine.
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