The Division Bell Mystery, Ellen Wilkinson

I was fascinated to read about the background of the author of this book: she sounds like a really interesting person, one of the first female MPs, and really dedicated to her work and her constituents. Respected across party lines, too! I was a little worried that her work was included for the novelty of the author being an actual MP writing about a mystery set in the Commons, but it’s competently done and the little personality sketches feel so real. She didn’t overwhelm the work with her actual knowledge, but she definitely used it to advantage.

The mystery itself isn’t exactly revolutionary, and her female femme-fatale style character (and the male reactions to her within the story) were so very, very typical of the period, but the ending brings in a surprisingly real note of pathos, and the setting is somewhat unique. It comes together into an enjoyable little amateur detective story, with some funny lines, some interesting details, and some surprisingly vivid thumbnail sketches of a few characters. I enjoyed it enough to rank it a cut above the sort of baseline enjoyment I’ve had with other British Library Crime Classics.

Rating: 4/5

Requiem for a Mezzo, Carola Dunn

The Daisy Dalrymple books are definite cosies: mostly victims the reader will dislike, while the real culprit is never someone the reader is meant to like, or had a really good reason if they are; a ‘clean’ romance, with Alec and Daisy decorously falling in love with only hints here and there of physical lust; blood and guts minimised. Requiem for a Mezzo continues in that vein as expected, with the poisoning of a woman who rather made the lives of everyone around her miserable — a literal diva who has made a career for herself as a singer at the expense of her sister. The villain is not quite as expected, mind you — but I won’t spoil that part for you.

The investigation goes along as expected: various suspects, the weird complication of a Ukrainian terrorist group (an issue mostly skirted around and not used to full potential), plenty of red herrings. Daisy remains likeable, though not someone I’d ever invite round to my house (someone would be sure to die). She’s a little bit too perfect, despite her unfashionably rounded figure and her freckles (it all just makes her sound comfortable and cute to the modern reader), but she gets away with it. Alec isn’t too clever, but avoids ever relying hopelessly on Daisy’s help. It’s all within the bounds of tolerability — this makes it sound like I’m damning the books with faint praise, which is not my intention: I deeply enjoy them for the cosy mysteries they are.

I found the resolution of this one maybe a little too pat. I don’t believe in the motive, and feel like we ended the book without an answer as to who was the real culprit. But it’s still fun, and there were some lovely character moments: not just Daisy and Alec, but little glimpses of other people’s thoughts and feelings that make it feel a little more real.

Rating: 4/5

The Winter Garden Mystery, Carola Dunn

No surprises that I picked up the next Daisy Dalrymple book pretty quickly — they’re just the perfect length for a long soak in the bath followed by a lazy evening, which is exactly how I’ve been reading them. I continue to enjoy the fact that Daisy’s a worker (although helped significantly by her class), and her relationship with Alec and his team; Phillip Petrie is rather a dear, despite being rather daft. His class-conscious snobbery fades away quickly as soon as he talks to someone for a while and discovers some things in common.

The new characters for this book are rather fun too: Lady Valeria is, of course, a battleaxe, while Roberta’s stubbornness is a joy. I called Sebastian’s relationships with various characters: it seemed very obvious up-front. I didn’t expect to like him, actually: he displays a pretty weak will to begin with, and a tendency to be led astray from what he should hold to — but in the end, he displays a bit of backbone and it really works. Ben was my favourite of the new characters, perhaps predictably: he sees some of the loneliness in Daisy’s past and is one of those people who reaches out and starts to help heal the wounds a little (brought on by her late love having been a conscientious objector, killed while driving an ambulance, and the way most people viewed him as a coward).

The mystery itself is solid enough providing you care enough about the characters to care about the outcome. When viewing the country house to write an article about it, Daisy sees a dead rosebush and comments on it. Once it has been dug up, however, a dead body is revealed — the body of a housemaid everyone thought had run off with a travelling salesman, who turns out to have been pregnant when she died. Daisy involves herself immediately on behalf of the young Welsh gardener (ugh, I was not convinced by his phonetically rendered accent) first accused of the murder, and calls Alec straight in. Of course, it’s a bit contrived — even twice all but falling over a dead body while visiting a stranger’s house for work is kind of unbelievable, so I do hope that there’ll be some variation on how Daisy gets involved as time goes on!

The central relationship of the books remains obvious, though it doesn’t develop too fast. Right now, Daisy and Alec are still thinking of the relationship as a possibility, despite their attraction to each other and the telling hints that they really do care. I’m looking forward to seeing this continue to develop.

All-in-all, still a fun cosy mystery, and Daisy is compelling enough a character for me to keep following the series — helped by the fact that I also care about Alec (as opposed to Amory and Milo in Ashley Weaver’s books, for example).

Rating: 4/5

Death at Wentwater Court, Carola Dunn

I really wanted another detective series, a little along the lines of Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher (without being a total clone, of course — that’s just boring). I tried Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs, and I found the first book less than satisfying — the writing choices took any possible tension out of it, while I found Maisie herself rather a cold fish, and more in the Sherlock Holmes line than the kind of sleuth I prefer. Reading my review of that book back now, I can’t even remember one of the major things that bothered me!

So, digression aside, did Daisy Dalrymple fit the bill for me? Thankfully, yes! She’s the Honorable Daisy Dalrymple, which is the same rank as Phryne, which made me go “hmmmmm” at first — but in many other ways she isn’t like Phryne, being rather less fashionable (she hasn’t even bobbed her hair!), and pretty rather than having major sex appeal. She works for her living rather than relying on endless amounts of money, and her past is not quite so dramatic as Phryne’s (no ambulance-driving during the war). Likewise, her romantic choice is fairly clear. Her inspector isn’t so far from Phryne’s Jack in temperament and such, but he’s a widower with a child, which introduces another interesting element to the personal side of the story.

The plot itself is fairly typical for a cosy. Daisy goes to photograph a rich family’s home and write an article about it, and during her time there a singularly unpleasant person is murdered. Daisy finds herself constantly trying to help the police, and ultimately has totally divided loyalties. There’s nothing new or startling about the plot, but it works as one of those books I read in the bath, and Dunn is good enough with characters that I sympathise with them, worry about whodunnit, and generally get involved enough to make it worth the time invested.

Having finished it, I ordered up the next few books, and dove straight into the second, which I luckily had on hand. I think it’s a good bet Daisy’s here to stay, at least for a few books more. (Then we’ll see if the formula gets repetitive, or keeps working despite being repetitive, and all that sort of thing.)

Rating: 4/5

The Mystery of the Skeleton Key, Bernard Capes

I didn’t know anything about Bernard Capes before reading this, only that this was a reissue of a Golden Age crime fiction book, much in the same line as the British Library Crime Classics. Good enough for me, at least when I’m in the mood to tune out and just read an old-timey mystery: this pretty much delivered on that, though it’s hardly the most original or the most exciting of that line I’ve read.

It actually takes a long time for the story to explain why it’s The Mystery of the Skeleton Key; at times, I was actually tempted to check the right book was inside that slipcover! After a long preamble involving some of the characters meeting in Paris, and a bit of mystery about a Baron who plays chess for half-a-crown and frequents the oddest places, eventually there is actually a murder to be investigated. The wrong people are accused, the timings are all mixed up, and the son of the house (because if it’s not quite a country house mystery, it’s definitely set in a country house) is implicated because the girl who gets murdered — killed with a shot from his gun — was pregnant with his child.

In the end, the solution relies on coincidence, spurious old-fashioned science (a man inherits an injury-induced mannerism from his father due to the fact that his mother saw his father with the injury while pregnant with him), and various people not being quite who/what they say they are. I think it’s actually quite interesting in terms of who the culprit turns out to be — not a common solution, and against Knox’s Ten Commandments in a sense — but otherwise there’s not much to set it apart, and in tone it’s fairly dry and without any sense of urgency. My main feeling was mild curiosity, and that’s about it. Nothing terrible, but nor is it something I’d recommend.

Rating: 2/5

The Lake District Murder, John Bude

For all the praise of the series’ editor in the introduction, I don’t think Bude is that great a writer. His work is certainly enjoyable, but I found some aspects of this mystery painfully obvious, and he steers clear of having a particular character be front-and-center, totally indispensable in that Great Detective sense. His main character is a working man, and his prose is rather workmanlike to go with it. That’s not necessarily a criticism, and if you want to experience the Golden Age of Crime Fiction there’s no doubt it’s worth a read… but if you were to pick just one of the British Library Crime Classics, or just one Golden Age novel, I wouldn’t recommend one of Bude’s to be it.

This particular novel follows Inspector Meredith as he investigates the apparent suicide of a garage owner. There’s a few telltale hints, though, that the suicide might be staged: for example, the man’s hands are totally clean (when they should have been dirtied in setting up the suicide), and he’d lain the table for dinner, even putting the kettle on. As Meredith investigates, some kind of smuggling case becomes apparent in the background — something the dead man was involved in, and wanted to get out of.

The police spend most of the book stumped and trying various convoluted ways to figure out what’s going on, without figuring out a principle that occurred to me right away. I won’t explain what it is, of course — maybe you want the pleasure of working it out for yourself — but I really found myself rolling my eyes. Also, once the why was apparent in the form of this smuggling ring, the who and even the how were fairly obvious.

There are no sparkling characters who can’t be resisted, and to be honest I didn’t think there were any brilliant set-pieces describing the landscape, or delving into the human psyche. It’s just a mystery, moderately well investigated by a bland policeman, and moderately well-written. Not bad to while away some time with, but I couldn’t possibly describe it as unmissable.

Rating: 3/5

Murder at the Brightwell, Ashley Weaver

When I picked this up, I was looking for something cosy, a bit Kerry Greenwood-ish, a bit Mary Stewart-ish. Mostly crime, maybe some romance, probably a main female character being terribly capable. Most of my wishes were granted: the heroine might not be quite as striking as Greenwood’s Phryne, and Weaver’s writing certainly isn’t as evocative as Mary Stewart’s (particularly not of location), but it’s a nice nibble.

The story opens with Amory being surprised by two visits: one, from her somewhat-estranged husband Milo, last known to be gallivanting about the Continent and linked with plenty of other women, and the second from the man she jilted to marry Milo — a man to whom she’d been engaged. Thus the romantic stage is set: who will she choose? Who really cares about her: her husband Milo, or her ex-fiancé Gil? That tussle is the constant backdrop to the mystery, featuring the unexpected murder of Gil’s sister’s fiancé… whom Gil never did get along with.

It’s a pretty obvious setup, but that’s kind of why I found it a relaxing read. Amory isn’t super-prepared for everything or as in control as a character like Phryne, but she does wear some nice clothes, and isn’t obviously a terrible person (if a bit daft for ever trusting Milo, maybe). Milo isn’t as charming as you’re meant to find him (I’m not distracted from the fact that he hasn’t explained at all why he was away from Amory so long or why he’s suddenly interested again), but I wasn’t expecting astounding characters and complex arcs. Putting aside my critical eye and just relaxing with the story, I had a pretty good time, and I’ve picked up the other books (completely perfect to coddle me through the cold I’m suffering, ugh) from the library. If you’re into cosies, this is worth a look; if you’re not, this won’t convince you.

Rating: 3/5

And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie

I started reading this to pass a few minutes at the train station, and ended up reading it all in one go. I always forget that Christie’s work is so enjoyable — especially when she stays away from her series detectives (I can’t stand Poirot). She really could write a solid mystery, and I do intend to pick up some more of her one-off mysteries, and possibly also give Tommy and Tuppence a try. She has a way of setting out the scenario, the characters, and really drawing you in.

And Then There Were None features a very careful set-up: ten characters are drawn together on an island where they can essentially be marooned and prevented from calling for help. Slowly, it’s revealed that each one of them has a death on their conscience — a driving accident, treatment withheld from a dying woman, an operation performed while drunk, fellow-soldiers abandoned to die… Each one has their excuses, their reasons, and not all of these are revealed in one go. When they arrive at the island, they don’t know each other or why they’ve been called there, each brought there on false pretences: after their first dinner, however, they get a shock when a voice reads out their names and the names of the person (or people) they killed.

After that, they begin to die, one by one, according to the means specified in a sinister little nursery rhyme… Those remaining come to the conclusion (of course) that the killer is among them.

There are aspects of this which haven’t aged well: the original “Ten Little Niggers” rhyme has been expunged by now and replaced with “Soldiers”, but there’s also some unpleasantness about Jewish characters and about native peoples “not counting”. Some of that is character, of course, but some of it seems built rather unpleasantly into the narrative voice.

However, the solution of the mystery works pretty well for me (it all hangs together and makes sense, and we had the clues), and the feeling of horror/suspense is well built up. It’s an enjoyable read, if you can ignore the unpleasantness about anyone who isn’t white, British and preferably middle-class. (Not that anyone really comes off well in this book, but that group isn’t slandered for the sake of being that particular group.) It’s not exactly groundbreaking, although part of that is hindsight, but it does the job and it definitely held my attention for a solid hour or two of (mostly) enjoyment.

Rating: 3/5