The Silent Film Star Murders by Melodie Campbell

 

This brand new traditional mystery from accomplished Canadian crime writer Melodie Campbell has all the panache of the original Golden Age crime fiction by notables Dorothy, L Sayers, Margery Allingham, and the inimitable Agatha Christie herself. In fact, several of those names are dropped by our illustrious sleuth, Lady Revelstoke as she cruises the high seas, partaking of delicious desserts in the First Class Dining Room.

Lady Revelstoke is no lady. She’s from the colonies, from a crime family (but that's a secret!) and widowed too soon after the Great War, left with a young son and a slew of business holdings as well as that convenient title. (And a castle, but we don’t see the castle in this book, it being inconvenient to pack and transport even on a grand ocean liner). 

 

In this second of The Merry Widow Murders from Cormorant, our Lady Detective is not even settled into her cabin yet when she realizes that she will have a famous silent film star as a dining companion at the captains table, along with the star’s current husband and mousy younger sister. They’ve barely left England when the first mystery of many pops up. Soon we are up to our ears in rival starlets, old flames and new, mysterious disappearances, and an inexhaustible stream of clues that seem to lead in too many directions.

Sorting out the real from the smoke and mirrors is a full-time job for Lady Revelstoke and her indomitable maid Elfreda. But they are more than up to the task, and Lady R makes good work of connecting with other bereaved wives and mothers, gaining vital clues along the way. 

 

In addition to the well woven shipboard background and the many discreet background references to the culture of the era, our illustrious sleuth, and her female, secondary characters, make clear the struggles and hopes of women who saw the Great War not only as a terrible tragedy, but as a step forward in the liberation of women, not only in work and family, but in politics and society. There is something bittersweet about their hopes, as here we are nearly 100 years after the fictional events of this book, and women are still struggling to keep the rights so long and hard fought for.

All in all, this is a very pleasant and also thought-provoking traditional mystery of an era long past, that will satisfy any weekend reader's murderous impulses.

#MerryWidowMurders #TraditionalMystery #CosyMystery #GoldenAge #OceanLiner #starlets #Hollywood #SilentFilm #talkies #CormorantBooks #GreatWar 

A Queer Case from 1929

A Queer Case 
by Robert Holtom 

It's 1929 and almost the Golden Age of the English murder mystery when bank clerk and would-be bon vivant Selby Bigge is out prowling Hampstead Heath in search of brief, illicit human connection when he bumps into an old flame from his university days. Well, not so much an old flame as a brief flicker of connection/affection/prospective amour at the end of a drunken night among fellow undergraduate academics. When Patrick, that well-dressed scion of a recently knighted sire, invites him for a meal at The Ritz, Selby's hopes rise for a rekindling.

Except this evening turns out to be a family dinner with the knight and his new wife, a lady much nearer Patrick's age than his father's. It soon becomes apparent that all is not well in that family circle. And, to further deepen the familiar trope, Selby is invited to the knight's upcoming birthday dinner at his relatively isolated manor on the far side of Hampstead Heath. 

 

Any reader of a Golden Age mystery knows what happens next.

This is very much a classic murder mystery, except that it's set amid the very real perils of being homosexual in the England of (barely) yesteryear, where the wrong glance or word at the wrong time or place could bring unwanted attention from the ever-vigilant police and public anti-sodomy brigade. Being caught in a compromising position with another man, even in the privacy of his own home, could cost cost Selby his freedom, his reputation, his job, and possibly his ability to live in England without being hounded everywhere. And yet he yearns for another kiss from his longtime crush. And so he agrees to help when Patrick falls under suspicion.

 

The subsequent investigation takes Selby through various London underground clubs and furthers his acquaintance with a cross-dressing baronet‘s daughter, Theo, who also wants to solve the murder. Tension is inevitable as Selby juggles and conceals his intermittent contacts with other gay men. There are some sage and essentially timeless observations about life and relationships, and especially marriage, from several angles of LGBTQ+ life experience. There's an homage to one of Agatha Christie's lesser sleuths, Ariadne Oliver, in the prolific if not, highly respected, crime writer who thinks Agatha Christie is stealing her plots. Any violence is constrained in true traditional crime novel style, and the solution owes more to careful thought and deduction than to anything so sensationalist as a climactic action scene.

All in all, a lot to enjoy, and ideal timing for its release at the start of Pride Month across North America. 

Thanks #NetGalley
#LGBTQ #murder #GoldenAge #murdermystery #HampsteadHeath #stepmother #knight #crossdressing #1920s #RoaringTwenties #detective #aqueercase #SelbyBiggeMystery

Give My Love to Berlin

Give My Love To Berlin

 by Kathrine Bryant 

 

An increasingly tense dual-timeline story split between a young woman in 1920s and 30s Berlin, and her American granddaughter many years later, piecing together this hidden portion of her family's history. 

 

The earlier timeline, following Tillie (Matilda), occurs when Berlin is the gay capital of the world. Homosexual, lesbian, and trans people are making strides in public acceptability and becoming stage sensations in Berlin's vibrant club scene...only for the rise of Hitler and his young extremists to push them underground again with increasing ferocity. 

 

These are the very early years of the National Socialist Party, when it is plotting strategy in the homes and offices of respectable lawyers and businessmen, aiming to make further seat gains fort the next election. Tillie's working in her father's law office when she first becomes aware of the political maneuvering, but at first she's unable to believe it could be a risk to her or anyone she knows. Not even when Ernesto, her best male friend, is spurned by his father, one of her father's main clients, over his homosexuality. But it begins to hit harder for Tillie's lover, Ruth, who is not only a cross-dressing nightclub entertainer and a lesbian; she's also Jewish.

 

In the modern timeline, the young Tillie is a grandmother now suffering from increasing dementia, which we see through the eyes of her granddaughter Thea, who is uncovering the old woman’s past even as the owner is losing it. The names of the two women, Tilly and Thea, take a bit of getting used to of separating mentally. 

 

As is often the case with dual timeline books, the modern narrative is less compelling than the one set in the past. We learn little about Thea except that she is poking around in her grandmother‘s stuff, trying to find out what the reader already knows from the past timeline. The author readily conveys Thea's struggle to accommodate her grandmother's increasing dementia while coming to terms with the void underlying the official family history she thought she knew.

Give My Love to Berlin is an Aimée & Jaguar tale for the current generation, but where the book by Austrian author Erica Fischer was based on a true story, Tillie and Ruth's doomed love story is fiction. Tillie is the daughter of a mid-level Party official, where the very real Lilly Wust was the wife of a high-ranking one. The resonances to struggles that current 20-somethings in the LGBTQ+ community face in many countries, both in the 1990s when the book came out and now, in the 2120s when Russia, much of the USA, and parts of Canada are actively dangerous for openly queer people once again. 

 

We have recent history to reflect on as well. France narrowly escaped rule by a far-right party through arcane constitutional shenanigans. Australia booted its harder-right government. Yet Germany’s AfD party has seat gains in their recent election, not quite 100 years after the events of this book.

It is very creepy sitting in Canada after a hotly contested federal election fueled by propaganda against the governing party and individual politicians, where homophobic slurs have become once more common currency. There are small local/regional newsheets and pamphlets in blue-collar coffee shops that  sound very much like those the Germans were using in the 1920s to turn citizens against at foreigners, immigrants, undesirables like trans and queer individuals and groups. There is less overt bias in mainstream media , except by their decision not to call out certain politicians or push back against certain statements or public actions to avoid backlash by (mostly) online thugs. And of course social media is a sewer filled with hate speech and more subtle disinformation pushed by bot farms and paid for by right-wing dark money, both home-generated and flowing in from the same US tech bro class that is currently looting and pillaging the government of that country. Are Canadians wise enough to see where this hate-fomenting trend could go and push back harder against the conservatives‘ more extreme base, both federally and provincially?

Ultimately, a good novel entertains you - takes you to a different time and space, into another person's story - even while it pushes you to reflect on your own world and time. This novel gives much food for thought.

 

 Give My Love To Berlin

 

by Kathrine Bryant

#Netgalley #AmphoraePublishingGroup #LBGTQ #GiveMyLoveToBerlin #BookBirthday #NewRelease #WW2 #NaziParty #history #persecution #propaganda #refugees #Jewish #lesbian #gay #Berlin #GermanHistory #nightclubs 

Bonus content: review of another wartime book by Erica Fischer, this one a memoir of her parents' struggles against Nazism and the belligerent vagaries of refugee life during and post-World War 2 

WHACK JOB: a history of axe murder

 WHACK JOB: a history of axe murder 

by Rachel Mccarthy James

 

Maybe not everybody gets as excited about axe murderers as I do.

 

Except possibly other crime writers, or true crime readers. And some historians.

But let me tell you, this little book has axe murders going way back into pre-history, including a fascinating digression on how to shape a hand axe for the best killing edge. That alone is worth the price of admission. 

 

The book then moves forward to/through recorded history: axe killings and forensic examinations of ancient Egypt, 1200 BCE in China, a Norse record of a mass killing in North America, the infamous Lizzie Borden murder, then on to the last, possibly darkest one a few years later. By the 1960s most homes had central heating and axes were less available. Methods for convenient or impulse murder shifted to more common household items.

This book is well written, in a breezy narrative style that yet stays quite focused and relays information in an anecdotal style that is yet very historically accurate. Highly recommended for fans of true crime and those with a generous range of historical lore already under their bonnets to fill in the cultural backgrounds behind the various deeds. 

 

Whack Job
Macmillan (May 2025)

 #WhackJob #axe #weapons #murder #history #historicalmurder #Norse #Vikings #LizzieBorden #weaponshistory #prehistory #prehistorical #handaxe #flintknapping #bronze #edgedweapons #killing #homicide #Macmillan

The Queens of Crime - early feminists?

The Queens of Crime

By Marie Benedict

The woman coming into the tea shop has drastically changed since the last time our narrator (Dorothy L. Sayers) saw her, only five months before. Very quickly we realize that the new arrival is the famous, even notorious, fellow crime writer Agatha Christie, who is still being hounded by the press after her mysterious disappearance years before. That's two Queens of Crime already! They're meeting to discuss the formation of The Detection Club, and how women writer-members are already being 'put in their place' by male writers, even though Dorothy had the idea for the club and got it off the ground.

Sounds familiar to any woman who has ever had a project taken over by a man once she's done all the legwork for it.

Dorothy and Agatha have a plan: lure their female crime-writing competitors to set aside past rivalries, stop the snark about each other's plots and characters, and form a cohesive resistance against the male takeover of the Detection Club. Baroness Orczy of Scarlet Pimpernel fame (with many other stories to her name), Ngaio Marsh with her Roderick Alleyn (and later Troy Alleyn) mysteries, Margery Allingham whose gentleman sleuth, Albert Campion, brought a touch of chaotic whimsy to his atmospheric adventures, are all invited to solve a ‘body in the library’ scene... in a real library, thanks to Dorothy's connections. 

 

Nowadays, crime writers' organizations, associations, and sisterhoods take women's membership for granted, but early in the novel there's a lifelike depiction of the first meeting and swearing in of Detection Club members, complete with a skull named Eric to swear on. And some overtly paternalistic and even misogynistic shunning of female members that goes a long way to convincing the other Queens they need to band together. An early sisterhood of crime writers, in fact, foreshadowing (a lovely mystery fiction concept!) the work of Sisters In Crime so many decades later.

 

Does it work? Well, that's part of the story of how these amazing crime writers end up collaborating to solve a real-life murder.

The author shows her knowledge of Dorothy L Sayers' personality and passions in both overt and subtle ways. One, early on, occurs when Dorothy is extolling the general benefits of women crime writers gathering together to support each other, and another when she notices a reporter referring to body of the murdered woman as 'it' rather than as 'she'. The author of Gaudy Night, that feminist exploration of women's higher education disguised as a mystery novel, could do no less than speak up for another woman stripped of her humanity in death. 

 

In fact, the dehumanization of the victim by the male-dominated police and press forms a large part of what drives the collaborating Queens to investigate the disappearance and death of a young woman on a day trip to France. There are similar nods to the known personalities, public quotes, and styles of the other Queens, but Dorothy's personal life forms the backdrop, showing an early modern variant of a double-career household.

The prose itself is solid and practical with occasional flights of fancy, but does not attempt to ape the styles of any of the Golden Age Queens in its dialogue or overall style. Descriptions are focused on the detecting, as they should be. Our narrator even reflects at times on the differences between detecting as portrayed in her novels and the processes - including the psychological and emotional - of detecting in real life, with a real person as the victim.

Overall a very enjoyable read with quality crime-solving, although historical purists may remark on the odd false note, such as when the elegant and refined Baroness Orczy (born 1865 to Hungarian nobility, and raised in an pre-WW1 era of unrelenting propriety of dress and deportment for women) would be seen leaning on a French train station wall at the venerable age of 66 years.  

BONUS CONTENT: A February 2024 essay about how those real-life Queens of Crime brought about the worldwide fascination with the detective novel.

While men seeded detective fiction, it was women who brought the genre to lustrous fruition. In the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, four stellar queens of crime writing — Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh — became doyennes of a popular culture phenomenon in publishing that would establish their dominion over a worldwide audience.

#Netgalley #StMartins #review #crimefiction #QueensOfCrime #historicalfiction #AgathaChristie #DorothySayers #MargeryAllingham #NgaioMarsh #BaronessOrczy #LordPeterWimsey #RoderickAlleyn #TroyAlleyn #AlbertCampion #ScarletPimpernel #HerculePoirot #MissMarple

The Cure for Women

Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine that Changed Women’s Lives Forever 

By Lydia Reeder

This book is both wonderfully and terribly timely in an era when under-informed male lawmakers and their supporters are once again trying to roll back women’s health care, especially around wombs and vaginas. Just as male dominated medical schools in the mid-1800s worked hard to remove woman as midwives from the birthing rooms, destroying centuries of traditional supportive care for pregnant and post-partum women, so a still-patriarchal medical system now is attempting to overturn much of the past 150 years of advances in medicine for women.

So many women fought to get us where we are now. Watching their labour, and all the work of other women since them, be overturned by ignorance and deliberate misinformation is both heartbreaking and enraging.

So who are those Victorian women who changed women's health care?

We learn about not only the Mary Jo Putney of the subtitle but also Harriet Hunt, who petitioned for the right to sit in on lectures at Harvard Medical School and organized the Ladies’ Physiological Society of Boston. Harriet later connected with early American suffragists Lucy Stone and Lucretia Mott, and helped make women’s medicine part of the national women's rights conversation. Harriet also joined with wealthy women in Ohio to start the Ohio Female Medical Loan Fund Association, that funded women medical students across the country via interest-free loans.

Elizabeth Blackwell, who was the first American woman accepted into regular medical school.

Sarah Hale, the influential editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the USA’s most popular women’s magazine in 1851, who ran a series of editorials praising female physicians as being ‘by nature’ more suited to take charge of the sick and suffering.

Ann Preston, the Quaker woman who was training in and organizing ‘irregular’ medical schools that taught about home and public hygiene , nutrition, and instruction on human physiology. She was also successful in enlisting Elizabeth Blackwell to help overcome Victorian women’s reluctance to give up their ‘purity’ over allowing doctors to physically examine them.

(Male doctors at that time generally examined women in the dark, by touch, with the patient fully clothed. Having access to female physicians permitted women to be examined and treated without fear of losing the respect and regard of their husbands, and was ultimately one of the chief social advances leading to a drop in women’s mortality rates in the latter half of the Victorian era.)

Marie Zakrzewska as a child spent a few months in a teaching hospital in Berlin, where her mother was training as a midwife. Marie took to following the doctor on his rounds and eventually he offered her books from his medical library to study. In adulthood she went back to the hospital to train in obstetrics and later emigrated with her younger sister to America, where she found that male doctors had succeeded in virtually barring women from practicing medicine. So she set up a knitting business instead. Eventually she connected with Elizabeth Blackwell through volunteer work at a homeless shelter and was invited to work with her. Marie was one of the early beneficiaries of the Ohio Fund to pay for her advanced medical training.

This is also a tale of men like J. Marion Sims, a surgeon and avid self-promoter who became very wealthy working on rich white women after he honed his techniques for gynecological surgeries on un-anesthetisd slaves and destitute women, often naked, in an auditorium full of men who found the weeping and screaming of the agonized women an added feature of the ‘show’. He started his first Womens Hospital by recruiting rich NY women to sit on a managing board, and then later incorporated it, removing all power from the women’s board and placing it in the hands of an all-male board of governors drawn from the richest magnates in the region, whose expertise lay not in medicine or womanhood but in making money. It’s not hard to see the entrenchment of the USA’s highly monetized health care system in moves like this.

Victorian women fought for decades to get the right to not only attend medical school but to treat patients and, maybe most important, to teach other women about caring for their own bodies. Now that is once again under threat, and it behooves all women to inform first themselves and then their sisterhood about the fight that got them the medical comprehension of women’s issues they have thus far benefited from in their lives. 

 

Let us not throw out all those hard-won gains by all those generations of women (and their few male allies) who fought this fight before us.

The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door

by H.G. Parry

 

COMING OCT 22, 2024 

from Hachette

 

2024 is a great fall for well-crafted fantasy fiction with a literary bent. 'The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door' is a must for any adult who still yearns to open a door and find themselves in Narnia (or some other fantastical world. Or had ever dreamed of other lands among the dreaming spires of Oxford like CS Lewis and JRRR Tolkein.

This book's getting the rare 5th star from me.
.
I'm right there with The Scholar (a teen named Clover) every step of her journey from the struggling family farm - struggling because her older brother was gravely wounded in WW1 and their father died in the Spanish Flu - to the dreamy spires of a fictional Camford: the secret magical university accessible through a door in the Bodleian library in Oxford or its Cambridge equivalent. The world of post-WW1 England, the elegant yet practical language, the relationships between students and their parents, even the mysterious world of the university Board and its sociopolitical secrecy, all feel real and complex and totally immersive even before Clover and her coterie get serious about opening the titular Door.

This is the familiar school of magic trope with an older cast and the richness of British university tradition behind it. In time and in literary space, think 'The Magicians' meets 'Jonathan Strange'  with a grim undercurrent from CL Polk's 'The Midnight Bargain' (which also deals with magical post-war trauma of a similar-feeling era). 

#NetGalley #TheScholarAndTheLastFaerieDoor #Oxford #Cambridge #WW1 #historical #Amiens #PCTSD #PTSD #scholarship #university #magic #Fae #magical #fantasy#Camford #CSLewis #Tolkien #CLPolk