In 1928 a new detective was introduced to readers. Her name was Maud Silver and she was as fond of knitting and quoting Tennyson as she was of solving crimes. She was the creation of Patricia Wentworth, who would go on to write thirty-two books featuring Miss Silver, including The Gazebo, which was published in the United States in 1956 and in the United Kingdom in 1958. Having called this post ‘Murder in the Gazebo’ it is a little late for a spoiler alert, and as you have no doubt guessed the garden building is the setting for key scenes, including the death at the heart of the novel.

Patricia Wentworth was the pen-name of Dora Amy Turnbull (née Elles). She was born into a military family in India in 1877, and spent much of her early life there apart from a spell at school in England. Her first husband, Lt Col George Dillon, was in the Indian Army and their daughter was born in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1903. Lt Col Dillon died in 1906 and his widow and daughter returned to England: ‘Patricia Wentworth’ started to publish stories and novels soon after. She married another military man, Lt Col George Turnbull in 1920 and he encouraged his wife’s career – apparently she dictated the stories to him.

It was not until she was in her early fifties that Patricia Wentworth first published a Miss Silver novel: Grey Mask appeared in 1928 with Miss Silver introduced as ‘A Sleuthess’ who could teach ‘old Sherlock’ a thing or two. The last of the thirty-two stories appeared in April 1961, a few months after her death on 28 January.

We are told that the fictional summerhouse which appears in The Gazebo was originally built as a belvedere in the landscaped garden of Grove Hill House. The grounds were sold for housing development in the late nineteenth century, and the gazebo now stands on high ground in the garden of a Victorian villa. The octagonal structure is described as having been built in around 1750, so perhaps it looked a little like the Temple of Victory at Allerton Mauleverer in Yorkshire.

The Flâneuse won’t reveal the plot, but it was, thought the reviewer for the Illustrated London News, ‘rather a corny motive, but a nice story’.

The Gazebo was generally well-received, with the critic at The Sphere hailing it as ‘indubitably’ the thriller of the week. Miss Wentworth was, he continued, ‘as neat a practitioner of the detective-story and slyly understated clue as one is likely to meet in a day’s march through a lending library’.

The Western Daily Mail critic seems to have invented a whole new literary genre when he wrote that it was a ‘good offering for those who like a bit of everything that can go on in a gazebo’.

It seems that the publishers thought that some readers would not understand the word ‘gazebo’, so there was an alternative edition entitled The Summerhouse. Which brings us to the great unsolved mystery of where the word ‘gazebo’ originated. According to the Oxford Companion to the Garden it is ‘jokey Anglo-Latin’ for ‘I shall look about’, but other sources suggest it is simply a corruption of ‘gaze about’ or that it was borrowed from an Arabic word. Whatever the etymology, it was in use in the sense of a belvedere, or a summerhouse with a view, by the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1741 Wetenhall Wilkes published a poem with the lines:

Upon the painful summit of the height
A gay Gazebo does our Steps invite.
From this, when favour’d with a Cloudless Day,
We fourteen Counties all around survey.

Wentworth’s novels were published in translation: in France the novel was called Le Belvédère and in German Tod Im Sommerhaus. 

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