2008 historical detection, first in Dean's Dido Kent series. In 1805
at Richard Montague's engagement party, he suddenly puts off his
fiancée Catherine and leaves for parts unknown. And a woman's body is
found in the shrubbery. Catherine's spinster aunt Dido tries to clear
up the mystery. US vt Bellfield Hall.
Unusual fare for me: I tend to feel that Georgette Heyer did
the Regency rather well, and avoid other authors' takes on it. But
this isn't the pastiche of Austen and Heyer that many books end up
feeling like; there's a distinct voice here, with interesting things
to say.
Having two mysteries seems almost like an embarrassment of riches, and
Dido's curiosity drives her rather beyond the bounds of politeness in
trying to solve both. Everyone has some sort of secret, but Dean
doesn't fall into the Ellis Peters trap of nobody ever having more
than one secret; here, a man could possibly be an adulterer and a
murderer. There are two sisters, one appallingly bad at music, the
other terrible at painting, being shopped around by their mother;
there's a young rake deeply in debt, and his father doing his best to
save him. Dido's own skills and experiences are important at first
(recognising the station of the mysterious dead woman by the quality
of her dress, and noting something about its construction which
reveals a further clue), but later on the game becomes one mostly of
social fencing and persuasion.
Yes, it's an English Country House mystery, with no significant
involvement from the forces of law. But it's not the closed
environment that that usually implies: Dido also ventures to a nearby
village and to a seaside resort. The tight third-person narrative is
broken up by Dido's letters to her sister, which allow the story to
skip forward over events that would be tedious to recount in detail.
The clues are there to lead one to the solution, but are well-hidden
in a forest or irrelevancies.
What really startled me was that Dean failed to succumb to the largely
American temptation to try to put the servants on equal footing with
the masters. They're here, they have important clues to give, and one
of Dido's abilities is that she's easily able to get on good terms
with them, but there's none of the sense of premature equality that
many recent books try for.
One slight flaw is that the Regency setting isn't thoroughly used;
there's a reference to spying for the French, and the marriage market
is on everyone's minds, but much of the goings-on could have happened
just as well in the twentieth century, at some place without the
telephone. That said, I think it's probably better to err in this
direction than to throw in a load of Regency trappings and hope that
some of them stick.
An imperfect book but a jolly good one. Recommended by Michael Cule.
Followed by A Gentleman of Fortune.
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