Carola Dunn, Die Laughing, 2003

Louise Penny, The Long Way Home, 2014

Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind, 2018

After several months (indeed years) of accumulation, over the summer I decided to make one of my periodic concerted efforts at putting a dent in my to-be-read shelf, which then stood at thirty-five books and counting. I started with wth collection of second-hand books from part way through various contemporary series that that have been recommended to me but which I have been motivated to buy unless I came across a used copy. I haven’t been entirely successful in completing this endeavour (a volumen of Sulari Gentil’s Rowland Sinclair mysteries is next on my list), but I did manage a couple of volumes from Louise Penny’s Armand Garmache series and a Daisy Dalrymple mystery by Carola Dunn.

The Dunn series is one that has been hovering at the edge of my consciousness for a number of years now. When I was reading my way through Frances Brodie’s Kate Shackleton series and Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series (recommended to me by the late, great Dennis Showalter, who knew whereof he spoke), Daisy Dalrymple regularly popped up in my on-line recommendations. So it was with interest, although not necessarily great expectations, that I started Die Laughing, the tenth book in the series. Unfortunately, these expectations were definitely not exceeded. One of the blurbs on my copy states that the book is ‘For lovers of Dorothy L. Sayers’, but like so many so-called ‘cosy’ crime novels with a British interwar setting, the only Sayers-like attribute that the book has is the fact that the detective (or at least one of them) is an aristocrat (although we are told multiple times that her title is ‘only’ an honorary one).

The problem is that the novel doesn’t work as either a classic detective novel, with a focus on the puzzle element, or as the sort of social reflection that makes Sayers (and many of the other classic queens of Golden Age detective fiction) such good source material for the social historian. By splitting the detective work between an amateur who doesn’t really want to be detecting and her professional husband and his team, the novel rejects the structural formality of classic detective fiction storytelling. Sherlock Holmes explaining his reasoning to Watson and Japp or Poirot collecting the suspects in the drawing room for the unveiling of the criminal may be the stuff of cliché, but such scenes work to construct a narrative with tension by making the unravelling the work of a single intelligence. Even where the sidekick or professional assistant makes as great a contribution to that unravelling as the detective, the sharing of information needs to be integral to both the plot and laying the evidence before the reader. For a masterclass in the approach, you only have to look at the conversations between Peter and Harriet in Have His Carcase (1932), which are used to convey any facts gathered separately as well as interpret them as part of the satisfying working out of the mystery. Not so in the world of Daisy Dalrymple and Alec Fletcher where each undertakes their own investigations and the sharing of clues is perfunctory, with little reference to either the plot or the character developments

So much for the structural form of the detective story. What about the novel as a reflection of society in the interwar period? Dunn has clearly done a certain amount of research into the period, but her representation of class is clumsy to the point of farce. The middle classes are almost uniformly snobbish and racist, with the exception of Daisy’s two female friends, who are only distinguishable from each other by the fact that one is Indian (and therefore the victim of racist prejudice). The working-class characters are distinguishable by their entirely generic vernacular, with a Scots policeman apparently speaking in almost exactly the same way as a Cockney charwoman. The theme of the ‘servant problem’ is shoe-horned into the book, with little relevance to the central crime or its investigation, and drawing on debates from the late nineteenth century, rather than those being articulated in 1924. The result is that, while the reader is told multiple times that the war changed class relationships, but we are never effectively shown this. I finally lost patience with the representation of a character, introduced to late in the book to be fully fleshed out, as a Second World War-style spiv, whose service with the Army Service Corps was used as shorthand for his not having served overseas during the war. Given the the extensive work of men of this unit as motor ambulance and lorry drivers on all fighting fronts, this misrepresentation smacked, like far too much else in this book, of superficial research and lazy historical cliché.

So I will not be seeking out any more of the Dalrymple series. I am, however, more ambivalent about Penny’s Gamache series, although I can’t say I was overly enamoured of either of the two volumes I read. I know many people love this but, like Elly Griffith’s equally loved Ruth Galloway series, I found the tone too knowingly whimsical for my taste. These series are, apparently, part of a genre now marketed as ‘character-led’ mysteries (presumably as opposed to action-led thrillers) but, for me, the characters were oddly flat. The reader is told, over and over, who these people are, and even what they are thinking, but this is rarely matched by them then acting in psychologically convincing ways. The criminal in one of the stories barely registers as a character in their own right, and certainly not as the magnetic character that we are informed they are. There is also a dissonance in tone between, for instance, constant references to an aged, sweary, alcoholic poet who keeps a pet duck and is loved (inexplicably) by her neighbours, and plotlines around the distribution of carfentenil and its brutalising effects on the homeless population of Montreal, that is jarring to say the least.

Penny’s writing is good enough to make me mildly curious about how she introduced her recurring characters in the first novel in the series, Still Life (2005). However, I can’t say I feel compelled to read any more, certainly not at the moment when unregulated holiday browsing in second-hand bookshops has my to-be-read shelf to closer to forty volumes. I am glad that I finally gave these popular series a go, but equally glad that neither captured me to the extent that I will now be adding any more of their work to that shelf.