Some Heyers I’ve read so often they’re more like old friends or cozy blankets when you’re ill or it’s cold outside. Books I reach for when thinking isn’t required.

Others, like 1932’s Footsteps in the Dark, I haven’t. I’ve read them once or twice, so I know the story, but the details are hazy.

Footsteps was Heyer’s first attempt at a mystery-thriller in a contemporary setting, and written largely because, like so often, she needed money. The between-war years were the Golden Age of mystery writing, and many were written to provide easy money for the writer.

This one, however, rather than being a murder mystery is more of a ghost mystery.

Footsteps in the Dark is the story of a family inheriting an old, rambling house in the country, which the locals say is haunted. The house is called The Priory (it has a ruined chapel with attendant graves), and the ghost, naturally, is the Monk.

Uncovering the story of the haunting is the main concern of the family: Celia and Charles Malcolm (one of Heyer’s flippant young men), Celia’s siblings Peter and Margaret Fortescue, and the siblings’ scatter-brained aunt, Mrs Bosanquet. It doesn’t help that there’s a right of way across the grounds, so they occasionally have unexpected visitors in the form of holidaying Michael Strange and one of the locals, an eccentric entomologist with a particular interest in moths. One of those absent-minded sorts of eccentrics who never really knows where he is, because there was this moth, you see, very rare.

There’s also a drunk French artist, with a “genius for colour” that no one else can … appreciate … Local gossips say he’s under the influence of drugs as well. Charles is roundly ribbed when, during the course of his own investigating, he allows himself to be persuaded to buy one of the paintings, and Celia refuses to hang it anywhere in the house.

Heyer did not claim this as a Major Work, on the grounds that “one husband and two ribald brothers” had a hand in it. Also, she was probably distracted by the fact that she was “increasing” : Footsteps in the Dark was, in fact, published on the same day as her son was born (both quotations from Kloester’s biography).

It isn’t, as I said before, a Heyer I return to very often, but the characters are very Heyer-esque, and her normal wit is present, so it is a lighthearted sort of read (as long as you don’t mind the spooky atmosphere and aren’t reading it at night in a new house where you haven’t identified all the creaks yet).

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