One Large Coffin to Go

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

One Large Coffin to Go is not really a mystery; it’s more an exercise
in frustration. Polly Deacon, the protagonist of the story, is a foolish
woman, the kind who takes ridiculous risks because she is so sure of her
own judgment and blind to what is really happening. As a reader, you
want to shake her until she sees sense. Or you would want to, if every
bit of sympathy for this character hadn’t been drummed out of you by
the time someone gets killed.

A back-to-the-land puppet-maker, Deacon finds herself pregnant and
almost engaged to her policeman boyfriend. To escape the unwanted advice
and occasional rudeness of all the nosy do-gooders in town, she takes
advantage of a bursary to attend a puppetry conference in Canterbury,
England. As soon as she sets foot in the Toronto airport, someone tries
to steal her luggage; the same thing happens several times in England.
At the conference, she meets a woman who looks remarkably like her and
is also visibly pregnant. When this look-alike winds up dead, Polly
refuses to entertain the possibility that these events may all be
connected. As a result, she endangers herself and her unborn child in
classic Perils of Pauline fashion.

H. Mel Malton is a fine stylist, but her plot is derivative and the
solution to the mystery is obvious a mile off. Although she acknowledges
the obtuseness of her protagonist, she takes Polly’s stubborn mindset
much too far. The best part of this novel—and it is very good—is the
strong sense of place and history that the author evokes at the many
Canterbury locations Polly visits. Later, in a scene at an Eastbourne
sea cliff, Malton creates a wonderfully foreboding atmosphere laden with
fog and fear.

This is the fourth in a series of Polly Deacon mysteries, and I confess
I have not read the first three. Perhaps this book works better as part
of an ongoing story. Certainly as a stand-alone novel, I found it
disappointing.