No One Dies in This House

No One Dies in This House is a comic historical-mystery set inside the House of Lords in July 1987. Its central joke is also its detective engine: because the Palace of Westminster is technically a royal palace, an ancient hereditary official called the Coroner of the Verge may still have jurisdiction over deaths inside it. The book turns that absurd constitutional relic into a murder investigation, a family melodrama, and a satire of Parliament’s instinct to bury anything inconvenient under procedure.

The protagonist is Morton Snow, Keeper of the House of Lords Archives and hereditary Coroner of the Verge. Morton is fussy, brilliant, lonely and almost pathologically attached to ritual: tea must be blended exactly, his bow tie must be straight, his waistcoat must obey Edwardian custom, and his office’s scarlet emergency telephone must never ring. It does ring. At the same time, Morton receives a fax from Annie Brownsea, an American woman he knew briefly in 1966. The fax warns him not to drop his teacup and says something is coming.

What comes is Felix Brownsea, a twenty-year-old American in an MTV hoodie, sent to London to research the constitutional roots of America. Lord Brownsea, Felix’s aristocratic uncle, and Lord Kingfisher spring the revelation on Morton: Felix is Morton’s biological son. Annie had become pregnant after her affair with Morton in 1966, returned to America, and raised Felix with Oscar, the man Felix considers his real father. Morton freezes when Felix calls him Dad, immediately revealing that he is far better at archaic jurisdiction than actual human intimacy.