Death at the Savoy by Ron Base and Prudence Emery
Priscilla Tempest is a mini-skirted Canadian twenty-something in the conservative men’s world of the Savoy Hotel in 1960s London. In the innocent course of her work as a press officer for that hoary institution, she keeps finding herself in the wrong place at the wrong time — in particular, far too close to the dead bodies that keep turning up.
But Priscilla is intrepid. In the face of frequent fears of being fired, she soldiers on. Coffee helps, as do champagne and cocktails in the American Bar with Noel Coward.
She also enjoys the company of men — especially young, good-looking ones. But which of her current admirers can she trust? The handsome one with the MG? The journalist on the hunt for a story? Or neither?
Each time scandal threatens the hotel, she is called in to see the General Manager. At each summons, she expects to be fired, and comes to think of his office as the Place of Execution.
Her job involves a number of odd things besides press releases. One one occasion, she is required to attend the opera with a famous guest who drinks too much; on another she is asked to accompany the General Manager’s mother-in-law on her shopping and sightseeing trips when she visits London.
The manager’s mother-in-law, Eunice, is not one to mince words. Apologizing for her daughter’s rudeness, she says, “Daisee’s under a lot of pressure so she lashes out, particularly at people like yourself who have to stand there and take it.” Priscilla has to take quite a lot more than that, in particular the characterization by the self-satisfied Commander Blood that she’s “a tart in a mini-skirt” who slept her way to her job at the Savoy and could now “endanger us all.”
Of course Priscilla is expected to dress appropriately for all occasions. Mini skirts are fine, as her male colleagues enjoy looking at her legs. On no account must she wear trousers, however. Even Katharine Hepburn was turned away from having lunch in a rival hotel for wearing trousers. The Savoy has the same old-fashioned rule.
The dialogue is sharp and the social commentary acerbic. When a guest is found dead in his room, Major O’Hara, the head of security, strokes his moustache and straightens his suit jacket “as though preparing himself for something particularly nasty and wanting to ensure he was properly dressed for it.”
The “somewhat ghoulish” Commander Blood heads an investigative team with the job of looking for potential trouble, and heading it off “before it becomes detrimental to the royal family.” He feels it his duty “to maintain the integrity of a country…otherwise falling apart.” That, muses Noel Coward, must be “exhausting work these days,” as he assesses the man’s clothing: “the pinstripes of the career civil servant — or the paid assassin.”
The chauffeur, Bogans, explains the business of wearing masks — metaphorical, not real. (This story takes place long before COVID.) “Masks,” he tells her, are what “we wear each day to perform for our guests…Our masks can cover up all sorts of things—except, finally, those masks slip…there are no secrets at the Savoy.”
During the course of the action, Priscilla receives a series of unwelcome marriage proposals. When Eunice supposes that her good looks and charm cause “all kinds of men” to throw themselves at her, Priscilla responds with philopshical candour. Not all sorts, she explains, but the wrong men, who rather than throwing themselves “seem to…crawl under the barbed wire when she’s not looking.” One of these is the hapless second son Aziz, who brings along his own gunman to make sure she will accompany him, then promises with an anguished look that no harm will come to her.
When another mysterious death in the hotel threatens not only Priscilla’s job but also her safety, she takes matters into her own hands. With her colleague Susie, she arranges to get someone out of his office so she can investigate a suspect in the employee records. She instructs Susie to meet her lunch date in his office and make sure the door remains unlocked when they leave, and Susie wonders aloud how she can manage that. When Priscilla advises her to employ her “considerable wiles,” she moans, unconsoled. “Where am I going to find wiles on such short notice?”
Later, as things heat up, Priscilla finds herself holding a gun. Later, when the crisis is past, she wonders whether the man in question had wanted to kill her or had been trying to save her. Either way, “it hadn’t worked. She had to save herself.”
Near the end of the book, Priscilla finds herself walking once more “toward what was in all probability her doom,” in the office of the General Manager. Bitterly, she reflects that “Life at the Savoy would go on as it always had in its luxurious bubble, far away from the world’s cares and conflicts.” Meanwhile, she will have to face “the ritual sacking—necessary, she assumed, for the good of the Savoy’s reputation.”
All in all, the book is full of clever language and delightful shenanigans. Nobody is safe from a ribbing, not the officious Buckingham Palace security people, not MI5, not even the frisky young Princess Margaret. In fact, not even Priscilla herself.