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It’s been a few years now since I became enamored of serial fiction and most particularly historical mystery serials. I’d been looking at the Maisie Dobbs titles on the shelves of my favorite local independent bookstore for a while. What most attracted me to them initially was the cover art by Andrew Davidson, very stylish illustrations of a woman wearing a cloche standing in interesting surroundings. They reminded me very much of the cover art of another historical mystery series I enjoy, James Benn’s Billy Boyle novels.
So I finally decided it was high time to sample this series. I picked up a copy of Maisie Dobbs and read it. I was hooked! I soon enough acquired the rest of the titles in the series that have been published to date. This review covers the first three, enough to give us all a good idea of what to expect from the rest.
Let me start with some background about the author: according to her on-line biographies, Jacqueline Winspear was born in Kent, UK and worked for many years on the administrative side of the publishing industry. It wasn’t until after she relocated to the west coast of the United States in the early 1990s that she decided to try her hand at writing. Like Barbara Cleverly (author of another one of my favorite historical mystery series, the Joe Sandliands novels), Winspear drew upon her family history for inspiration. Her paternal grandfather Jack Winspear suffered serious leg wounds at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and sold fresh produce from a horse-drawn cart upon his return to civilian life. Her maternal grandmother Clara Clark worked in a munitions plant during the Great War and was partially blinded in an explosion there.
Yes, the Maisie Dobbs series, like both the Joe Sandilands and the Lord Edward Corinth-Verity Browne series, is set primarily in England between the wars. Maisie has a very interesting personal history, which influences her actions in every novel. Born in 1897 in southeast London, Maisie experienced her mother’s death when she was just thirteen. Her father Frank, who sold produce from a horse-drawn cart, wanted a better life for his bright child, and so put her in service with one of the households that he visited on his daily rounds. The matriarch of this very aristocratic household, Lady Rowan Compton, soon recognized Maisie’s gifts and referred her to an equally gifted friend, Maurice Blanche, who became Maisie’s mentor.
With the support of Lady Rowan and Mr. Blanche, Maisie attended Girton College at Cambridge University until the Great War called her to service. She trained as a nurse and served at the front lines. She met and fell in love with a young medical doctor. They were both injured, he more severely than she, when a shell struck the tent in which they were working on an injured soldier.
Using a combination of chapters with explicit dates earlier than the novel’s present time and flashbacks told from the viewpoint of that present-day Maisie, Winspear reveals all of this about her main character in Maisie Dobbs. She deftly re-introduces the basic facts about Maisie in subsequent installments of the series, making it feasible for a reader to start the series with one of the later titles.
At the time the action commences in the first novel of the series (in spring 1929), Maisie is just setting up shop as a private investigator, taking over Maurice’s work as he moves into retirement. She still calls upon Maurice for advice, and still regularly visits both Lady Rowan and her father. She soon hires another veteran of the war, Billy Beale, to help her with her casework. These are the main characters of the first two novels in the series. Other characters, including an occasional love interest, come and go as the longer story unfolds across the series.
While she is every bit as intelligent as her famous predecessor Sherlock Holmes, Maisie has a number of gifts and carefully cultivated practices that set her apart from every other crime-solver I’ve ever encountered in print or video. These make her both a sympathetic and an utterly fascinating character and lend an entirely distinctive aspect to her efforts to solve cases.
Maisie has very definite psychic and empathic abilities that she has developed to a state of refinement under Maurice’s tutelage. She uses these routinely and quite un-selfconsciously in investigating virtually every case and often in conducting her daily life. For example, upon entering a crime scene or any other room of interest, she will often sit quietly for a while with her eyes closed, allowing her intuition to pick up impressions that she subsequently records in her case notes. She keeps incredibly meticulous case notes, by the way. As a trained social scientist, I find her note-taking practices quite exemplary.
To say a bit more about Maisie’s notes, she also writes reflective asides on them, in much the way I expect the college students I advise to engage in ongoing reflection on their learning as they proceed through their studies.
My very favorite of Maisie’s practices is her assumption of a person’s posture and gait as a way of entering into that person’s state of consciousness. As a dancer, this practice makes perfect sense to me. I haven’t quite figured out how to emulate it, but I am working on that!
Maisie’s goal in all her cases is not just to resolve the problem brought to her by the client, but also to make peace with the presenting situation in all its dimensions. Yes, this is a very tall order because it often involves parties who have on the surface very little to do with the case and it invariably calls upon Maisie to recognize and deal with some aspect of her own history before she feels she has reached a satisfactory resolution. Once again, she relies on her intuition to tell her when she has reached that place.
Each of the novels in the Maisie Dobbs series runs approximately three hundred pages in length, pretty typical of others I have read in this genre. Winspear writes in third person but tends to keep her focus almost entirely on the world as Maisie sees it, so that the reader doesn’t have access to a lot of information outside her purview.
Without being at all overbearing, these novels convey quite a lot of information about the aftermath of World War I in England and about the British social class “system” in the period between the wars. They are considerably less focused on the larger political and economic situation in England and the rest of Europe than, for example, the Lord Edward Corinth-Verity Browne series, and of course they lack that dynamic tension between lead characters that one encounters in a series with more than one lead. Fortunately, Maisie is quite an entertaining character all on her own!
(Penguin, 2003, 2004; Picador, 2005)
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