Where is the girl, who by the boatman’s door, Above the locks, above the boating throng, Unmoor’d our skiff when through the Wytham flats, Red loosestrife and blond meadow-sweet among And darting swallows and light water-gnats, We track’d the shy Thames shore? (From Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” (1865) , set around Oxford.) More detective fiction! But this time it’s actually from the interwar period–the Golden Age–rather than just being set there. An all-female Oxford college, full of clever, high-spirited girls with enough time […]
Putting the “lady” into lady detective
The Hon. Phryne Fisher swaggers through the social scene of 1920s Melbourne, tossing cocktails down her throat and good looking young men into bed with equal facility. Melbourne in the 1920s is an uneasy mixture of glamour and poverty; Phryne, with her title, her unlimited reserves of funds and seductive sang-froid, as well as her street-smarts (and street-fighting skills) and connections, works as a private detective for the kicks rather than the cash, and as something to do between shopping for haute-couture and befriending the helpless and downtrodden. […]
A Hell of a Ride
My first review of an Agatha Christie book was of They Came to Baghdad, a light-hearted romp through global conspiracies to bring about World War III, archaeological digs, mistaken identity, and the intricacies of romance with a man who looks like Lucifer, star of the morning. Despite the joie de vivre of heroine Victoria, and the comic aspects of the perilous situations she found herself in, the central message of Baghdad was that it is better to “serve in heaven than reign in hell,” that what […]
From Victorian London to Victorian Ankh-Morpork
I love Terry Pratchett’s books. They’ve got me through the first raw days after breakups, through long train and plane journeys away from people I love, through the gloom of having a cold at the beginning of spring when the world is bursting with light and colour. I love the eerie technology of the clacks in Going Postal, the blood and fire of Carpe Jugulum, the pain and anger and sweetness of the Tiffany Aching sequence, the terrible beauty of Lords and Ladies, and the […]