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 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 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. 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.
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