I’ve been meaning to read Celia Fremlin for a while, encouraged by JacquiWine’s excellent reviews. Happily, this coincided with my plan to read some Christmas-set golden age/cosy mysteries in December, as The Long Shadow (1975) builds its tension through a haunted group of houseguests throughout the festive period.

I immediately knew I was in for a treat with Fremlin. We join Imogen at the first party she’s attended since her husband died two months ago. We quickly learn that while she is grieving, she also recognises that Ivor was not a pleasant person. There is no sentimentality in her reflections.

“How Ivor would have loved being dead! It was a shame that he was missing it all. How he would have loved to watch the letters pouring in, day after day, by every post, in their tens and in their dozens, each one a tribute to himself.”

She also casts a critical eye over the niceties of solo party attendance:

“She’s a widow, that’s what she is. With wooden detachment, Imogen watched Myrtle’s social aplomb faltering before the task of finding something intriguing to say about Imogen: something at least as amusing as Dutch Elm disease.

She gave it up.”

There’s also some astute observations about the deeply odd ways that the English approach the bereaved:

“Even Edith Hartman from next door had at last stopped popping in with cups of tepid Oxo and soothing stories about people who had died of cancer recently.”

But soon Imogen has more to worry about than navigating social mores, as someone rings in the middle of the night, telling her they know she killed her husband.

Told from Imogen’s point of view, she is clear she didn’t kill him. She has little time to reflect though, as it’s not long before her adult step-children turn up; the somewhat reprobate son Robin, and acquisitive daughter Dot, with her husband Herbert and their two young sons, Vernon and Timmie.

More bafflingly, Robin brings an almost silent girl to the house who wafts around preparing macrobiotic food, and Ivor’s scatty second wife Cynthia flies in from Bermuda to also take up residence. Then someone starts moving Ivor’s papers and updating them, the children have faces visiting them in nightmares and see a man in a Santa costume sat in Ivor’s study, and Imogen begins to wonder if a ghost isn’t part of the company too…

“It was high time Ivor got moving. It wasn’t fair to be dead and yet to stay around like this, in every room, in every corner of the house”

As a reader we are meant to be sceptical of ghosts and suspect everyone else, and they certainly act suspiciously! All of the adults seem to be Up To Something but I certainly couldn’t work out what was going on.

The Long Shadow is well-paced at only 242 pages, with a finale that is satisfying and believable. There’s even a final comic twist right at the last sentence. It’s certainly made me keen to read more Fremlin and thankfully Faber have made more reissues available.

Although not heavily Christmas-themed, it’s a great Christmas read with its house full of extended family, things unspoken, and would be easily digested after a dinner of heavier festive fare 😊

To end, two of my favourite folk singers coming together to sing insults at each other in honour of Christmas (please note, they have updated some of Kirsty MacColl and Shane MacGowan’s name-calling, but the language remains decidedly colourful):