Author Heron Carvic was a study in contrasts. Born Geoffrey Richard William Harris in 1917, his public persona took him into very visible roles as an actor, and yet he was such a private person that very little is known about him. He did reveal that he was a great-grandson of Sir Richard Mayne, one of the two original Commissioners of Police, and happily married to Phyllis Neilson-Terry of the famous British theatrical family (including her parents and her cousin, John Gielgud).
Carvic's acting roles were mostly dramatic and often included crime or science fiction. One of his early parts was in The Bat, a stage adaptation of Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Circular Staircase, and later roles included Gandalf in a radio version of The Hobbit, Jonathan Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace, and guest roles in the TV shows Police Surgeon, The Avengers, and Dr. Who.
Thus, it's curious that he chose to write a comedic mystery series featuring the slightly barmy English spinster, Miss Seeton. But it was a success from the start with the first book, Picture Miss Seeton, a finalist for the Edgar Award in 1969.
Carvic had first used Miss Emily Seeton in a short story, and fifteen years later said that "Miss Seeton upped and demanded a book," with Carvic deciding that if "she wanted to satirize detective novels in general and elderly lady detectives in particular, he would let her have her lead." Later, Carvic contributed a chapter to the book Murder Ink, edited by Dilys Winn, titled "Little Old Ladies."
Carver said at one point that the character of Miss Seeton was inspired by his friendship with an artist who turned in a commission for a mother-child portrait and then destroyed her canvas of the mother's face rather than use it again. Years later, the now-adult son from the painting was sent to the Broadmoor psychiatric hospital after cutting his mother to ribbons with a kitchen knife. The author had no logical explanation for her destruction of the canvas, but "clearly she must have somehow have seen rather more than she knew."
Emily Seeton is a recently-retired art teacher in the process of moving to the country town of Plummergen, population five hundred and one, but her plans get waylaid when, after a night at the opera, she sees what she thinks is a man insulting a young woman. In fact, what she actually witnessed was a notorious drug dealer knifing a prostitute. (Which brings up a typical Seeton-esque line when she learns from the police about the young woman's "profession": "Oh, dear. A very hard life; such late hours—and then, of course, the weather. And so unrewarding one would imagine."). Aghast at the drug dealer's "bad manners," she pokes him in the back with her brolly (umbrella, to Yanks), which later makes her a darling of the newspapers, which dub her "The Battling Brolly."
When she's questioned by Superintendent Delphick and Detective-Sergeant Ranger of Scotland Yard, they ask her to sketch her impressions of the crime. Even though it was dark, she's able to draw enough details, particularly an element that she only sees in her subconscious, that it helps the police track down the killer. Miss Seeton, as it turns out, is an "anti-psychic." She has a knack for innocently drawing clues (sometimes foretelling events, sometimes revealing important character traits) into her sketches that she's is totally unaware of, a talent that becomes invaluable to the police. Her innocence becomes one of the series' central devices, as she continues to attract crime and criminals even as she accidentally helps to foil them.
If your taste in mysteries runs toward the whimsical, then you'll be entertained by Miss Seeton, her brolly, her attempts at yoga, and snippets such as this one, about two denizens of Plummergen:
They were dedicated vegetarians, known collectively as The Nuts. Miss Nuttel, tall, angular, with the face of a dark horse, was generally referred to as Nutcracker. Mrs. Blaine, whose dumpy geniality was belied by the little blackcurrant eyes, was called by everyone Hot Cross Bun; this derived largely from Miss Nuttel's pet name for her of Bunny, but it may have been also a tacit acceptance of the shrewish temper which flared through the placid surface when she was thwarted. Their house, Lilikot, a modern innovation with large plate-glass windows screened by nylon net, was inevitably The Nut House.
Sadly, Carvic only completed five novels in the series before being killed in a car accident in 1980. The Miss Seeton series didn't die, however, continued under two other pseudonyms, Hampton Charles, the pen name of Roy Peter Martin, who wrote three novels all released in 1990, and Sarah J. Mason, writing under the name of Hamilton Crane, who took up the series after that point, writing sixteen installments so far, the latest in 2018.
