Three Sisters Flew Home

Not every woman can collect her dethroned lovers and their wives into one room. But then Claribel was not ‘every woman’. Things happened at her parties and so one swallowed the latest baits and joined all the other poor fish. But having given her party, having collected her bevy of expectant friends, having displayed her three mysterious lovelies, it was painfully bad tactics to make them play a murder game. All sorts of curious things were liable to happen when one let loose such a motley throng in a darkened house. So really it was Claribel’s fault, and she had only herself to blame when things did happen. A fairy tale with a sting in its tail.

About the Author :
Mary Fitt was the pseudonym of Kathleen Freeman (1897-1959) a classical scholar who taught Greek at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire in Cardiff. Starting in 1937, she wrote 27 mysteries and a number of short stories as Mary Fitt and was elected to the Detection Club in 1950.  Aside from her detective novels, Freeman published many books on classical Greece, scholarly articles and children’s stories. She lived in St Mellons in Wales with her friend Dr Liliane Marie Catherine Clopet, a family physician, who wrote short stories and fairy tales.

Review :
Such exquisite writing...assured beauty of the style....reading is sheer luxury "A first novel, quite out of the ordinary...an entirely unconventional, even fantastic, murder story." Not straight mystery, as the story ends with the death -- and the reader knows who did the dastardly (?) deed. Centers around woman artist who collects for a New Year's party all her enemies, male and female, and plays murder. Everyone has a motive -- the only guess is which gets there first. When I saw that Mary Fitt was about to give us a murder committed during the playing of the murder game, I quailed; the thing has been done so often.  Now that I have finished "Three Sisters Flew Home", I confess that if its authoress chose to re-write the dullest adventure of Sexton Blake or Rupert Bear, I would read and re-read. As chapter after iridescent chapter passes of this book, your suspicion that such exquisite writing must be a fluke becomes lulled, then dissipated altogether, and you relax on the assured beauty of the style as on to a bed of down;  thereafter the reading is sheer luxury.  We are guided through the mazes of Claribel's party by a Vergil whose insight into the developed human soul is wise even to devastation, and whose ability to perceive and convey beauty is rare indeed.