Requiem for Robert

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.

Times Literary Supplement (Maurice Willson Disher, 27th June 1942)Haunting regret gives Miss Mary Fitt’s writing its distinctive quality.  With this she disconcertingly moves us to deep feeling in Requiem for Robert over an old lady’s memory of being a wallflower in the eighteen-seventies, over a tutor leaving the house where happy years have been spent, over a young English officer climbing stairs in a French house which he fears he should not have entered.  The chief pleasure of her new detective story lies in the sudden experiencing of such emotion; one can never be sure when it will happen next, for the narrative twists and turns as Robert’s relations talk to Superintendent Mallett and Dr. Fitzbrown—almost on holiday in the mountains.  How and why Robert died is not an enthralling problem.  Yet Requiem for Robert is an enthralling book.  This is more because of the author’s powers of writing than the plot.