Where Was the Editor?

In Georgette Heyer’s 1937 mystery novel, They Found Him Dead, there’s a curious mix-up in the correct relationships between family members that appears within the first nine pages.

Silas Kane is having a 60th birthday party, and the guests are described by their relationship to him. He is the head of the business firm of Kane and Mansell, which was started the previous century by old Matthew Kane.

Old Matthew Kane founded the firm in the 1800s. He and his unnamed wife had four sons. The first was John, who married a woman named Emily Fricker. At the time of this story, John had died and Emily is an 80-something-year-old widow. Their only child Silas is the head of the firm.

The second son had only one child, now-39-year-old Clement, heir of Silas, and married to the shallow-minded gold-digging Rosemary.

The third son went to Australia and had just one son before dying; the son also died and left a daughter named Maud who married Edwin Leighton.

The fourth son, James, married a woman named Norma and produced a son, James (Jim), and then a daughter who died young. The elder James died at Gallipoli during the Great War, about 1915. Jim is in his late twenties or 30 and is single. He doesn’t work for the family firm; he works for the national Treasury.

This would all be fairly clear, if complicated, but it gets difficult to understand because the author identifies Jim Kane as the nephew of Silas, when he is actually a first cousin. She also says that Clement is a nephew of Silas Kane, and again, he is another first cousin. It is true that Silas’s mother, Emily, is the aunt of Clement and James. The erroneous relationships are repeated up until page 9, when suddenly they are all straightened out and thereafter all called “cousins” correctly.

When you are just getting into a mystery and know that you need to understand the family relationships because it’s a cozy, and everyone knows in cozies the first relationships mentioned are going to be vital, it’s pretty disconcerting to have the relationships change like this. Where was the editor? Probably someone who never heard the word “genealogy.”

For shame, Editor.