Review: "How's Your Mother?" by Simon Brett

 

“How’s Your Mother?” by Simon Brett Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Oct. 1983   Simon Brett’s, “How’s Your Mother?” is a traditional mystery with a humorous edge and a perfectly surprising twist. Humphrey Partridge and his ailing 86-year-old mother live quiet lives in a charming, if gossipy, English village. Humphrey is a doting son—he prefers the company of his mother over anyone else. But a rumor, started by a busybody at the post office, that Humphrey will inherit a bundle from his mother and that he would emigrate “to Canada if only he hadn’t got the old girl to worry about” raises suspicions about Humphrey when his mother mysteriously disappears. “How’s Your Mother?” is a snappy and funny whodunit—with a marvelously ironic ending—and a dead mother and gossip at its center. Brett adroitly plays with the reader’s expectations to deliver more than one surprise and he does it in his usual light-hearted style. But the real thrill is the smile it will spark on the readers’—at least this reader’s!—face with its perfectly ghoulish final words.

“How’s Your Mother?” was first published in the U.K. in The Mystery Guild Anthology, edited by John Waite (1980).