This review by Donna Bird originally ran on GMR.
Dolores Gordon-Smith, A Fete Worse Than Death (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2007)
Dolores Gordon-Smith, Mad About the Boy? (Soho Constable, 2008)
Dolores Gordon-Smith, As If By Magic (Soho Constable, 2009)
I came across a copy of A Fete Worse Than Deathat one of our favorite local used bookstores a few weeks ago. It looked interesting, so I picked it up. Further research revealed that the author had written two more installments in the series, so I figured I would read them all and review them as a group.
This is a murder mystery series, set in England just a few years after the end of World War I. If you are a murder mystery buff, I don’t have to tell you that this is a very popular locale and period for these. In my own reading and reviewing experience, I count the Maisie Dobbs series fully in this group, the Joe Sandilands series at least partially in this group (most of Joe’s adventures take place in India and on the Continent, so the setting isn’t a full match). Thus you will forgive me if I make occasional comparisons to these other series in my review of this one.
The protagonist, Jack Haldean, makes a living writing mystery novels and short stories. He works for a monthly magazine called On the Town. Occasionally he’s called upon to write other features for the magazine. He’s single and lives in rooms in London, although we don’t learn that until As If By Magic — the two earlier novels in the series are set in rural Sussex. A veteran of the Great War, he served as a pilot and officer in the Royal Flying Corps and suffered a leg injury that occasionally acts up. His Spanish mother gave him his dark coloring, which causes some people to assume that he is a Gypsy.
Gordon-Smith doesn’t provide a lot of background about Jack, so he is much more of a cipher than Maisie Dobbs or Joe Sandilands. Her occasional vague references to a past that is not part of the series may be as disquieting to some readers as they were to me. In A Fete Worse Than Death, for example, Jack calls in a favor with a high ranking official in the War Office whom he calls “Bingo.” But there is no background to tell us who this man is or how Jack knows him. Similarly, in As If By MagicJack has lunch with his godfather, Archie Wilde — but this is the first, last and only time Archie shows up, and Gordon-Smith doesn’t give us any inkling as to the role this man plays in Jack’s life.
A Fete Worse Than Death opens with Jack at a village festival with his cousin Greg Rivers. Jack is staying with Greg and his sister Isabelle and their parents, Sir Philip and Lady Alice Rivers, at their country house. At the festival, Jack encounters a rather unsavory man who served under his command in the war. That man soon shows up dead in the fortuneteller’s tent. His friend and apparent business associate is later found dead in his room at the local pub. Jack gets rather deeply involved in the subsequent investigation, which is led by Superintendent Ashley of the Sussex police. In presenting his credentials to Ashley, Jack refers to a prior relationship with Inspector Rackham of Scotland Yard, who finally shows up as a character in As If By Magic. A related sub-plot in this novel concerns a young heiress for whom Sir Philip is a guardian.
Jack is back at Hesperus in Mad About the Boy?, celebrating his aunt and uncle’s silver wedding anniversary. He and Superintendent Ashley collaborate in investigating and solving another series of murders. This time one of Jack’s oldest friends, Arthur Stanton, is under suspicion. Arthur suffers from the condition then known as shell-shock (what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder), which complicates his case. A further complication is that Arthur is in love with Jack’s cousin Isabelle, whose head has been turned by a very attractive and ardent race-car driver, Malcolm Smith-Fennimore. Along with Cousin Isabelle, Uncle Philip and Aunt Alice are back in this novel. Cousin Greg, who played a rather important role in A Fete Worse Than Death, is working in Malaya for the whole period covered by Mad About the Boy?
Although the murder mysteries in both of these novels were perfectly satisfying, I was still feeling more than a little disconnected from Jack’s character when I finished As If By Magic So I was greatly relieved to discover that, with the publication of As If By Magic, Gordon-Smith had finally addressed some of the problems presented by the earlier installments. As I’ve noted above, Jack is living in London, and Inspector Rackham finally shows up as a real person and not just a job reference. Jack puts in an occasional day at the office, and sometimes even sits down to write at his desk at home. The novel even opens on a stated month and year, October 1923.
The basic plot of As If By Magic concerns Jack’s old RFC mate George Lassiter, who suffers a series of misadventures that bring him to London from his home in South Africa. Cold, hungry and suffering the effects of malaria, George breaks into a house to warm up and believes he has witnessed a murder there. Jack discovers through Rackham that George is in London and provides him with a place to stay. George is eventually reunited with a family he never knew he had. The London Lassiters run a company that builds aircraft. One of their major investors is found dead in the Thames River and Jack and George join Inspector Rackham in solving the mystery. Although George starts to believe that he only imagined the murder in the house, he continues to push for a resolution of that uncertainty, as well.
The first novel appeared from Carroll & Graf in the very last year that company published books. Another New York-based company, Soho Press, picked up the next two books on its Soho Constable imprint, which also publishes the Maisie Dobbs and Joe Sandilands titles in the US.
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