I recently watched the David Suchet version of the Poirot story, The Clocks, and was reminded of a staple of golden-age^† detective fiction: the overseas fortune as motive for murder. In some ways it’s not that different from any other fortune as a motive for murder, but it does have a few special features that I think are worth considering.

One of the great things about an overseas fortune that some character inherits is how mysterious the thing intrinsically is. The family structure and how people fit into it is something no one is very likely to know. This is a bit more true in golden age detective fiction when people in different countries rarely visited each other unless they were rich, long distance phone calls were either non-existent or prohibitively expensive (depending on exactly what year we’re talking about) and camera portraiture was was rare and special. Yet it is still true even in our age. For example, I have various (second, third, etc) cousins in Greece, one of whom I’ve even corresponded with on occasion and even seen pictures of on Facebook (years ago, before I stopped using it), but I could be fooled by nearly any Greek of the correct sex and age if they were to come over here. How much more true this is of my cousins I’ve never spoken to or seen pictures of!

The inheritance of overseas fortunes also, of necessity, involves execution of the will by people who only need to be fooled for a short time. Frequently this is done because the rich decedent had no (surviving) issue and so the will must be executed by lawyers as a final act for their client. This works well, but even if some cousin or nephew or some such were made executor of the will, they would have had little enough contact before the connection (the recently deceased relative) died, so they are likely to have even less afterwards. The decease of their relative and the naming of them as executor has placed a burden on them which has no compensatory convenience, so they will likely want to get it over with as quickly as possible. Common honesty will make them want some evidence that the person to whom they are giving the money is the correct person, but this is easily dealt with by an author since, after all, it doesn’t really make any difference to the executor exactly where the money which isn’t going to them goes.

This discussion of the execution of wills makes me wonder, now, what the mechanism of enforcement is for the executor. In the normal case, I believe that the principal beneficiary tends to be named the executor, and people who receive some portion can achieve enforcement through suing the executor. This does not really apply to the case of an overseas fortune, especially to someone who has no idea that they stand to inherit anything. The executor would take possession of the money or property or what-have-you, and there would not really be anyone who would know to object. Wills are relatively private things, after all. I need to research this further, but I suspect that there is some fertile ground for finding a motive for murder that consists of the executor of a will not bothering to find the overseas inheritor, and then coming across them and murdering them in order to avoid having to give up the inheritance (especially if a large portion of it that they could not repay is already gone).

There is another advantage which golden age mysteries had, which is the simplification of the laws of inheritance which has in some places happened after the golden age has limited the pool of suspects. I actually must confess that I have no idea how intestate inheritance works in the United States; the advice I’ve generally heard is that if you have anything to leave people, one should draw up a will. Neither, come to think of it, do I know how intestate inheritance works in the present-day United Kingdom. I do, however, know that in England the Administration of Estates Act of 1925 directed that aside from a few relatively close classes of relatives, the estate of someone who died intestate would go to the Crown (this formed a major plot point of the novel Unnatural Death). Still, it’s easy enough, I should think, to have some rich person write in their will that failing the main intention, all of their money should go to their closest living relative, and provide some funds for the finding of this relative.

The most obvious way to produce a motive for murder with overseas inheritance is for someone to pretend to be the inheritor; they will have a fairly good motive for killing anyone who would recognize the deceit. The other fairly obvious motive this can produce is a more distance relative whose relationship is unknown killing a closer relative, preferably before the knowledge of the inheritance comes in (potentially when the rich overseas relative is in his last months or on his death bed, rather than after his death). Something that can combine the two is killing the actual inheritor in order to pretend to be the person who will inherit. (This was done in Peril at End House, where the will only specified the inheritor by first name, and someone of the same first name killed the actual inheritor in order to pretend that she was the person named in the will. With the relationship having been kept secret, there was no one to say otherwise.)

Less obvious, but still viable, is a person committing murder in order to clear the way to marry the person who will inherit a fortune before it is known that they will. People are less on their guard against gold diggers when they believe they don’t have any gold.

If you’re willing to have the murderer be mistaken and kill without gain under the misapprehension that they would gain, then the overseas fortune is fertile ground for a thing. A person who believes a nearer relative to already be dead might kill the only remaining closer relative, only to be surprised that it was for nothing when the closer relative shows up alive. This can be great at disguising the motive since the person’s potential for inheritance will have been forgotten about, especially if all of this happened before the rich person actually died.

Speaking of the long-lost relative who is supposed to be dead, overseas fortunes are also great for this since if the family is already spread over two countries, spreading them over three or four is no great stretch of the imagination. Golden age mysteries also benefited from being written around the height of the British Empire, when it would be normal for people to go off to dangerous places to seek fortunes and never be heard from again, presumably dead. Still, this sort of thing is not too hard to do in modern times, especially if one only needs family members to think a relative dead and not to have an actual death certificate.

This possibility could also go in the interesting direction of a person lying and saying that a nearer relative died years ago in another country when they hadn’t, only for the nearer relative to turn up years later. There certainly would be motive to kill this nearer relative when they show up, before anyone can find out that the wrong person inherited. Years later, few people would think of a connection between the money and the dead man.

The details of finance are boring to most people, which is a huge boon to murder mystery writers.

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† I should explain that I include The Clocks as a golden-age story despite it being published in 1963 both because I think we can grandmother Agatha Christie’s later stories into the golden age and also because the Davis Suchet version re-set the story into the 1930s and it worked very well.