Inspector Ramsay Investigates

The recent release of my Miss Riddell boxset doesn’t mean I’m ending Miss Riddell’s cozy mysteries; in case you'd thought that. I’m just going to give Inspector Ramsay a chance to shine. When we last met him, in Miss Riddell and the Pet Thefts, he’d been invalided out of the force and, as a widower, is alone with his sole companion, a dog, Bracken. After Ramsay helped Miss Riddell and her sister, Jane, rescue two missing pets, he’s once again left with time on his hands. As it’s still summer, he thinks maybe he won’t return straight home but continue the ‘walk out one midsummer morning’ he’d set out to do. And as he's in England’s northwest where the nearby Lake District and its high fells might remind him of his native Scotland, he decides to hike to the summits he can see in the distance. Ramsay has never been to the Lake District because work was always too tying. The fells, however, don’t remind him of home because he grew up at Largs on the Clyde and in the Scottish Lowlands. What was even more dismaying to him was that the fells were a lot higher and more rugged than Northumberland’s Cheviot, where he’d first practiced walking.

“We’ll start small, Bracken,” Ramsay said, looking at the heights around him. “I remember reading Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle to…” he paused, he hadn’t spoken his sons’ names since the night they were killed in the bombing.

He shook himself and continued, “and here before us is Cat-Bells, the hill where Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle lived. We’ll start here. It looks simple enough.”

But in fiction, like life, nothing is ever simple, particularly for a sleuth, even a retired one…