The Dead Don't Get Out Much

Marie T. Gillis is a member of the Angus L. Macdonald Library staff at
St. Francis Xavier University.

This is the fifth volume in a series of mysteries featuring lawyer
Camilla MacPhee. Abetted (often hampered) by her assistant, Alvin
Ferguson, Camilla is hot on the heels of her elderly friend Violet
Parnell. It’s Remembrance Day, and Mrs. Parnell, shocked into a near
heart attack by something that she has seen or heard (“I’m terribly
troubled by a dead man,” she says), has left the hospital against her
doctor’s advice and disappeared. Camilla and Alvin find her apartment
ransacked. Was she abducted, or did she leave of her own accord? The
trail leads Camilla, thankfully sans Alvin, to Italy, and a series of
adventures in a car slightly larger than a breadbox.

Humour is very subjective. Keep that in mind when I say that Alvin
Ferguson, meant to be a humorous character, I’m sure, struck me as the
most irritating person I’ve come across in fiction in a long time.
Whiny, confrontational, and generally unpleasant, he makes the first
third of the book tiresome.

Alvin aside, this adventure is basically lighthearted and
good-humoured. Camilla is distracted on her quest by her feelings for
Ray Deveau, a Cape Breton police officer whom she is trying to fit into
her life. She is also subject to what is often a fatal flaw in a mystery
heroine: by the middle of the book, you realize Camilla will always make
the wrong decision, go down the wrong road, follow the wrong lead, jump
to the wrong conclusion, miss the obvious clue. And yet she is
inherently likeable; as a reader, you root for her to succeed.

Maffini creates strong secondary and even tertiary characters, and her
travelogue through Italy is evocative and extremely enjoyable.
Furthermore, she peppers the book with letters from Mrs. Parnell’s
past, centred on the time of World War II; these letters add an
interesting element to the story. The solution is surprising, and
perhaps stretches credulity a trifle, but the coda leaves you satisfied.
The Dead Don’t Get Out Much is not a perfect book, but it is a
pleasurable one.