Murder on Mustique by Anne Glenconner, review: royal thrills on the Caribbean

Thanks to an appealing mixture of forthrightness and pawky self-deprecation, Anne Glenconner has become a celebrity since her memoir Lady in Waiting appeared a year ago. Now, aged 88, she presents her debut novel – with herself as the central character. Is this flagrant egotism, or simply humble recognition that her readership is more interested in her life than in her novelistic prowess?

The character does have a different name – she’s Lady Veronica Blake, known to all as Lady Vee – but, like her creator, she has spent decades as a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, has a tricky relationship with her “mercurial” husband (the real Lord Glenconner was as mercurial as a box of frogs), and spends much of her time on Mustique, the island which her husband once owned.

The book is set in 2002, with Lady Vee looking for a new role after Margaret’s death. Luckily somebody starts bumping off her neighbours and she gets to play Miss Marple, employing the observation skills she has honed during all those years of keeping a lookout for anything that might set Margaret off on one of her tantrums (Lady Vee puts it more tactfully, of course).

This is a pretty standard whodunnit, which will teach you a bit about coral conservation and Obeah magic as well as telling you why the Queen loves Mustique and everybody has Nicky Haslam design their villa interiors. The prose veers from the clunky (“an urgent request for an ambulance rarely signals good news” – no kidding!) to the genuinely evocative (“Tides don’t exist on Mustique; the ocean only advances and retreats by a few inches each day, like a shy suitor, afraid to embrace the land”).

But what makes this vicarious Caribbean holiday worth taking is the pleasure of our hostess’s company – the book is suffused not just with mere charm, but with the author’s genuine, and genuinely attractive, personality.