Book review: “This Fatal Writ” by Sara Woods

Antony Maitland — an English barrister, a British spy during World War II, a thorn in the side of official police and an investigator with a knack for solving mysteries — is the hero of 49 novels by Sara Woods.

In the early pages of This Final Writ, published in 1979, Woods describes him this way:

Antony Maitland could be sober enough in court, but it is undeniable that a charge of behaving, all too frequently, in an unorthodox fashion could quite fairly be levelled against him…And anyone wanting to substantiate such a charge could also have pointed out that the household in Kempenfeldt Square was in some respects an unusual one.

That household is a four-story house belonging to Maitland’s uncle the daunting Sir Nicholas Harding, as it had belonged to his father and grandfather. After his military service in the war, Maitland joined his uncle’s law firm and moved with his wife into the top two floors of the home.

 

“Dead scared”

Over the years, it’s been a generally comfortable arrangement — up until now.

To everyone’s surprise but Jenny’s, Sir Nicholas had married, at the end of the Trinity term, Miss Vera Langhorne, barrister-at-law…Both Antony and Jenny knew the new Lady Harding well and were fond of her, but whereas Jenny was blithely optimistic about the new menage, Antony had his moments of doubt.

The fear is that the new couple will want their home all to themselves, requiring the Maitlands to move somewhere. That’s where things stand as the novel opens, and, as the story unfolds, Maitland finds himself increasingly unsettled.  He feels, as he tells Jenny at one point:

“As if  — I know it’s nonsense — as if I were thirteen again and had come to live here for the first time and was dead scared of saying or doing the wrong thing.”

 

“A pinched look”

But it’s not just about their living arrangements.  Maitland and Sir Nicholas are also at odds about Maitland’s investigation of charges against a newspaper reporter, Harry Charlton, accused of treason for passing military secrets to the Soviets.

Uncle Nicholas thinks Maitland is wrong-headed for agreeing to take on the investigation.  In many ways, Maitland agrees with him, but said yes because of Charlton’s nineteen-year-old live-in girlfriend Claire Canning.

Maitland remembers Claire when she was eleven, standing in the corridor outside the number one court at the old Bailey, a scene in the Woods novel Though I Know She Lies (1965). As then, Claire now has

a pinched look, as though the evening was cold, and a sense of purpose about her that meant that, for better or worse, she had made up her mind to some course of action.

 

Odd quirks and vulnerabilities

This Final Writ came in the middle of Woods’s long run of Maitland novels, number 29. The English-born Woods (real name: Lana Hutton Bowen-Judd) began writing her Maitland mysteries in 1961, shortly after she and her farmer husband Anthony moved to Nova Scotia in Canada.

Thereafter, she produced an average of two Maitland books a year for a quarter century. (She also published 10 other novels under three pseudonyms in 1980 and 1981.)

Woods died in 1985 at the age of 63, and the final three Maitland books were released posthumously.

In Maitland, Woods created a character with odd quirks and vulnerabilities.

Although a former spy, he is nothing like a James Bond. Indeed, he has a painful shoulder injury from the war that severely limits his physical ability. Late in this novel, when some quick dangerous action is necessary, he has to rely on a friend.

When angry, Maitland stammers, a very un-Bondean weakness. And then there’s his emotional uncertainty about where he stands with his uncle, a father figure whom he revers while also feels the need to challenge.

 

A homey touch

There is a mystery and a couple murders in This Final Writ, and Maitland does solve the puzzle.  But all of that is rather secondary to the questions that bother Maitland and the reader all the way through the novel:

Is Sir Nicholas deeply angry with his nephew? Will he demand that Antony and Jenny move? Can the two men find a way to get along?

That’s a nice homey touch to a genre that, of course, is all about evil, violence and murder. A nice change of pace.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

4.11.25