Spring Preview 2015: Part Six

Our regular guest blogger,
Lady Jane Digby's Ghost

It's spring; time for the colors of budding trees and flowering plants to greet us, as the world awakens from winter's drabness. And there are new books to discover and maybe add to that huge pile by your bed or your favorite reading chair. Here are a few more of spring's new "crop," starting with two established authors with new books coming out.

Jacqueline Winspear is back with another book in the Maisie Dobbs series. The new book, A Dangerous Place (Harper, March 17), is set in the mid-1930s, in the British Crown Colony of Gibraltar. Maisie is returning to England after a long stay in India. She had gone to India to recover from the pain of her short marriage to James Compton, whose death in an airplane accident in Canada also caused Maisie to miscarry their child.

In a brief stop on the journey from India to England, Maisie impulsively disembarks in Gibraltar and lets the boat sail on without her. She's not ready to face the ghosts of her past in London. While in Gibraltar, she gets involved in a murder investigation and begins to regain her crime-solving mojo.

Jacqueline Winspear began writing her Maisie Dobbs books in the early 2000s; this is the 12th in the series. The first few novels in the series were extremely well written, with Winspear carefully detailing the back story of Maisie's life, her studies at Cambridge and her nursing work in France in the Great War. She created the character of Dr. Maurice Blanche, who was Maisie's mentor and teacher as Maisie opened up her detective agency in London after the war. We read the cases that Maisie took on in those first few books, and we see her private life, as the doctor she had loved during the war is taken from her by a lingering death. Maisie and the secondary characters were brilliant creations in Jacqueline Winspear's talented hands.

Gibraltar

But then Winspear seemed to lose interest in her character and the stories devolved into somewhat interesting cases of the time. Maisie whined a lot and we heard a great deal about her assistant, Billy Beale, and his unfortunate family. I think Winspear may have wanted to move Maisie through the 1920s and into the 1930s and pre-World War II England. The books lost their specialness and I do think Winspear lost readers. Last year, she published a standalone novel about World War I soldiers and life on the home front, called The Care and Management of Lies (Harper, 2014). It was good, not great. Now, she has returned with A Dangerous Place.

I had the opportunity to read an advance review copy of A Dangerous Place, and I liked it a lot. Winspear writes Maisie with a seemingly renewed interest in the wider world around her––a visit to Spain and involvement in the Spanish Civil War––as well as a return to her use of psychology in crime solving. While I don't think this new book is quite as good as her first few books, I can see a return to the style and to the character Maisie Dobbs should be.

Another established author with a new series book is David Morrell, who lives out here where I am, in Santa Fe, and who has spoken several times at my adult learning program. He's a professor of American Literature and is very mild-mannered in person. You'd scarcely picture him as the author of the Rambo series and other killer-thrillers. But he's also written quieter, more historical fiction.

Morrell is the author of Murder as a Fine Art (Mulholland Books, 2013), a study of the lurid murders in Victorian London and the involvement of writer and opium addict, Thomas De Quincey. It is an excellent historical novel, and Morrell has returned with a sequel, Inspector of the Dead (Mulholland Books, March 24). De Quincey and his daughter, as the main characters, look at London murders during the Crimean War. They are aided by two Scotland Yard detectives who were introduced in Murder as a Fine Art. I am looking forward to devouring this book in the coming week!

Okay, you should know that I adore family sagas. I am never so happy as when I'm deeply involved in the fortunes and woes of a large family. (I wish that Taylor Caldwell's publishers would bring back her Dynasty of Death series, that special three-book examination of the sins of the arms-manufacturing Bouchard family, which extended down through many generations.)

One of the best new family sagas I can recommend is The Rocheforts, by French author Christian Laborie (Publishers Square, May 5). The book, a longish saga of the Rochefort family of the Languedoc-Roussillon region in southern France, begins with an 1898 mystery. A man is spotted entering a darkened house and seen leaving with . . . something. The reader doesn't know what the bundle is, but the author gives clues. And we do find out, later on.

The story moves in time to the merging of two family fortunes––fortunes of unequal size, however––with the marriage of Louise Rouviere and Jean-Christophe Rochefort. Louise is from a prosperous farm family which, unfortunately for the father, Donatien, consists of only daughters. He and his wife decide to adopt a child from an orphanage in Nimes and groom him to take over the family farm. The rest of the book is the story of the Rochefort and Rouviere families and how the two interact, interlove and intermarry. The villain of the book––and there really is only one––is the patriarch of the Rocheforts, Anselme, who, time and time again, manages to alienate everyone around him. (I say there is just one villain, but there is another bad guy, a sort of Anselme Mini Me.) From Anselme, the lies and coverups do go from generation to generation.

Another excellent family book set around the same time is first-time novelist Alexis Landau's The Empire of the Senses (Pantheon, March 17). The book is set mostly in Berlin and begins with the mixed marriage of Lev Pearlmutter and his Christian wife, Josephine, in the early 1900s, extending through World War I and into World War II. Landau does a superb job of looking at how the religious and societal differences of Lev and Josephine and their two children are reflected in the German society of the time. The Empire of the Senses is not a mystery in the accepted sense of crime fiction, but it is rather a mystery of the personality.

The book's action begins in 1914, as Lev Pearlmutter leaves his family to go off to war, joining millions of other men from France, Britain, Russia and Austria-Hungary, as they prepared for the war they thought would be over by Christmas. Of all the reasons soldiers enlisted, probably few did it for the same reason as Lev Pearlmutter did; he wanted to prove to the Christian family he married into that he was just as good a German as they were, despite his Jewish background.

Lev is sent to the Russian front and spends four years as a medic. While there, he falls in love with Leah, a young Jewish woman, whom he is loathe to leave at the war's end. But he returns to his wife and family and his assimilated place in Berlin society. As the 1920s proceed, the Pearlmutter family falls apart. Tolstoy was right about unhappy families, and the Pearlmutters are a classic example of his dictum.

I read The Rocheforts and The Empire of the Senses in prepublication and can heartily recommend them both.

I have placed my preorder for Anne Enright's The Green Road (W. W. Norton & Company, May 11). Enright is an Irish author who has had several other books published here in the US. I haven't read any of her previous novels, but The Green Road looks very interesting. It's the story of a family of Rosaleen Madigan and her four grown children, who return to their childhood home to divvy up both the possessions and the memories. We've all seem this story line before––with some families more dysfunctional than others––but Rosaleen Madigan and her children look like a family I'd like to meet.

The only Canadian mystery writer I've read is Louise Penny, the author of the Three Pines/Armand Gamache novels. But now I've found Gail Bowen, who is publishing 12 Rose Street (McClelland & Stewart, March 3), the 13th in her Joanne Kilbourn series. Joanne, a resident of Regina, Saskatchewan, is described as an amateur sleuth, which seems to imply a lack of official detecting by the police. This book is about the mayoral campaign of Kilbourn's husband, Zack, and the murders that seem to crop up in its wake. The murders have a personal connection to Joanne and Zack and she's pressed to work to solve them. I'm intrigued.

By the way, Louise Penny has another Gamache novel coming out in August (as she has been doing every year, like clockwork), titled The Nature of the Beast (Minotaur). It should be interesting to see if Penny is able to revive the Gamache character and storyline after last summer's rather poorly received The Long Way Home. I know I'm going to wait until the first reviews to buy the book.

Can a mystery be something other than that of crime? Can it be about human survival in a hostile environment? If that interests you as a reader, I'd advise reading a memoir newly published in English by Marie Jalowicz Simon. It was just published in England by the Clerkenwell Press under the title Gone to Ground (translated from the German by Anthea Bell), and can be ordered in the US from third-party sellers or direct from the UK. Alternatively, you can wait a few months until it is published in the US under the title Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman's Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany (Little, Brown and Company, September 8).

Marie was a young Jewish woman in World War II Berlin who became a "U-Boat," that is, a Jew who attempts to live a life in hiding. The were given that name because they attempt to move under the Nazi radar. They moved from one hiding place to another, trying to evade German officials who wanted to send every Jew off "to the East." I'm still reading the book, but what strikes me is the fact that as Marie Jalowicz Simon moved around Germany, from 1941 to 1945, she had no idea how long she was going to have to keep living on the edge. Although the news of the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1943 portended the end of the war and the Nazi regime, no one knew the fighting––and persecution––would end. I'm not sure I could survive that wartime mystery of not knowing.

Another Holocaust-themed book is getting a lot of buzz––not all of it positive. Williams College professor Jim Shepard's seventh novel, The Book of Aron (Knopf, May 5), is a novel set in the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II. It's the story of Aron, a young boy separated from his family in the ghetto, who lives at Janusz Korczak's orphanage. Shepard seems to be unsparing in his description of the brutalities and horrors of the ghetto and how the children live (exist?) through it. A friend of mine read the book and reviewed it by asking: "why was this book written?" By that, he meant, why had Shepard chosen yet again another Holocaust story, when there are so many out there? I don't know, and maybe every book should be read––by someone––if only to keep the subject alive and in people's minds and hearts.

Some quick thoughts. Nelson DeMille has a new book out this spring called Radiant Angel (Grand Central Publishing, May 26). This is a new entry in his John Corey/Kate Mayfield series, and it's a big boy, with over 600 pages. I hope it's far better written than the most recent book in the series, the execrable The Panther (Grand Central Publishing, 2012). Look for the new one if you're a DeMille fan (as I used to be).

If you're looking for a fairly good double biography, take a look at Hissing Cousins: The Untold Story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, by Marc Peyser and Timothy Dwyer (Nan A. Talese, March 31). Those cousins––the title is a play on the "kissing cousins" term––are Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth. The authors play up the "competition" between the Democratic and Republican side of the Roosevelt family. It's pretty well written, but a bit heavy-handed in its treatment of this war of the cousins.


Note: Thanks to the publishers (and Amazon's Vine program) for providing advance review copies of A Dangerous Place, The Rocheforts, The Empire of the Senses and Hissing Cousins.

Jumping the Shark

Lady Jane Digby, painted by
Joseph Karl Stieler

Today we welcome a guest writer, who calls herself Lady Jane Digby's Ghost. Read a little about her inspiration, 19th-century Lady Jane Digby, here.

Lady Jane Digby's Ghost: I'm a history jock and a voracious reader, which combine to make me a prodigious consumer of European and American mysteries. I don't like cozies, but appreciate that others less hard-boiled than I do. I often consult Wikipedia while reading to get the 411 on people and places referred to in the text. After retiring––honorably––from several careers, I live in Santa Fe where I review books for Amazon, participate in our local adult education group, www.renesan.org, and hang out with my cats. I was born in 1951–you do the math.

I like series books. I really do. I like returning to old friends and accompanying them on their new adventures. And I particularly like mystery series. Give me a new volume in British author Susan Hill's masterful series starring Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler and I'm a happy clam.

But all too many authors have hung on to their once-interesting characters for one or two books too many, and it's the reader who pays the price. Literally "pays the price," as in money spent and time wasted on a book in a series that, once upon a time, was good reading but has degenerated into a mishmash.

When the author loses interest, the reader does, too. But all too often, the author doesn't realize he's lost both the series and the readers until the books stop selling.

So, who's still "got it" and who should hang the characters out to dry? These are my picks, based on years and years and years of reading.

Daniel Silva has been writing his Gabriel Allon books since 2003. They feature an Israeli spy/assassin who wants to leave Israeli intelligence and make his avocation, art restoration, his trade. But, like Michael Corleone in The Godfather III, just when he thinks he's out, they pull him back in. In Silva's case, this happens annually, as a new series book appears every summer, like clockwork.

The books are getting a bit repetitive, but they could be improved by further character development. Give Allon a kid––one who is not killed in a terrorist attack. Let Chiara, Allon's younger Italian wife, age a little, and become a little less gorgeous. Give her a haircut. Finally, kill off Shomron, who seems to be a pain in everyone's side in Israeli intelligence. Silva needs to move forward to keep me reading.

Jacqueline Winspear is the author of the "Maisie Dobbs" series. While the series started off well, Ms. Winspear seems to be losing interest in her character and the plots are becoming rote. It's difficult to explain, but Maisie was originally a nuanced creation. She was mentored by Dr. Maurice Blanche, a noted psychologist. After serving in World War I as a nurse in France, she returned to London to set up a detective agency, where she used psychological insight to solve cases. The cases in the succeeding books were well thought out. The past few books seem slapdash, though, without the careful writing Winspear is noted for. She seems to be going through the motions.

Winspear is publishing a new book in April, The Care and Management of Lies: A Novel of the Great War, that does not seem to be part of the Maisie Dobbs series. I think it's time she created another leading character and series. She's a really good writer.

"Charles Todd" is the mother/son writing team who have two World War I series, one featuring Inspector Rutledge, and the other Bess Crawford. Rutledge has been keeping my interest, but the Bess Crawford character seems to be stuck in time. She needs a major shake-up––maybe marrying her father's adjunct, who's been in love with her forever. Maybe as the Great War draws to a close, so should the Bess Crawford character. Or, as the two series are placed in two slightly different times, maybe the final book should be Bess meeting Rutledge. They do seem to have a common friend, Melinda Crawford, who is Bess's cousin and a friend of Rutledge's family, and who appears in both Todd series.

British author David Downing has run out of Berlin train stations with which to title his John Russell series. Masaryk Station, in Prague, was his last book in the series. His main characters, journalist/spy John Russell and actress Effi Koenen, have reached a natural end to the World War II and post-war period, and Downing has gracefully tied up his loose ends in a good final book. He has a new series set in World War I, with the first book, Jack of Spies, published last year. I thought it was a bit overwritten, but otherwise a good start to a new series.


Philip Kerr, with his Bernie Gunther series, keeps his character interesting by not writing the series in timely order. The books are set everywhere from 1930s Berlin, to Cuba in the 1950s, to the Russian front during World War II, and more. The reader never knows where––or when––Bernie will turn up next. That keeps me buying and reading the books. I think that his first three books, now combined in one large volume, Berlin Noir, are his best; some of the best writing about 1930s Berlin available.


Alan Furst will continue writing as long as he wants. He has built up such a following that his books sell well to readers who love everything he puts in front of them. Because he also alternates time and place and characters, his books stay fresh––though look out for his standard scene in a French bar in every book, no matter where otherwise set.

I'm a big fan of British author John Lawton, who writes the Troy series, set in London. Like Philip Kerr, he ranges his books throughout a vast period of time and there are enough characters in the Troy family that the storylines are kept fresh. (Note to American readers who also read British books: Beware when ordering Troy books from the UK. For some odd and unknown reason, Lawton's books sometimes have different titles in the UK and the US. You might see a book on a British seller's site, think you haven't read it, order it, and then be disappointed when it arrives because it is a book you've read, under a different title.)

Many readers have not yet discovered the Billy Boyle series, set in World War II, by author James R. Benn. There are eight titles in the series––like Daniel Silva, Benn publishes a book every summer––and are beginning to get a bit tired. Billy is a former Boston police detective who is a sort of enforcer for his uncle, General Dwight D. Eisenhower.  As befits Billy's background, he "looks into things" for "Uncle Ike" in the European theater.

Benn has improved greatly as a writer, but he's beginning to lose me as a reader due to the repetitious plot lines. Benn also tries to write Billy a love interest, which seems to be spurious at best. He doesn't need one, and her presence drags down the story. (This is a major pet peeve of mine; love interests in books where they're not needed, but are there because the publisher feels they should be, to juice up sales.) Still, every September, I'll look to see if Benn has a new Billy Boyle title. If you haven't heard of James R. Benn, look him up; you might like his wartime mysteries.

There are many other series of mysteries and police procedurals set in England, Canada and the United States that I'd like to cover in future guest posts.

So, what authors and series will you continue to buy and read? And which ones just seem to have petered out, but the author doesn't know it? Let us know.

Wanted: One Strong, Smart, Sassy Woman

Be warned. Today's post is just one long complaint. I'm feeling distinctly grumpy about female protagonists in recent mysteries. I've reached the point of throwing the book across the room with three series I used to read regularly. Here is my lineup of female sleuths no longer welcome in my library:

Gemma James. I used to devour Deborah Crombie's series featuring Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James of Scotland Yard. Crombie wrote some terrific mysteries, like Dreaming of the Bones and Kissed a Sad Goodbye.  She has a real talent for plotting and conveying a strong sense of time and place. Eventually, Crombie developed a personal relationship between Duncan and Gemma, and now they're married and sharing their children.

With Duncan and Gemma no longer work partners, Crombie seems to have chosen to depict more of their home life as a way to keep up with them as a pair. But the swap of domestic detail for detective collaboration is a poor exchange. In her most recent book, No Mark Upon Her, Crombie includes such teeth-gritting scenes as kids squabbling in the car, Duncan and Gemma negotiating childcare responsibilities and, in case I wasn't already in complete despair, a birthday party for a three-year-old.  It could only have been worse if she'd added in the children singing. (Yes, W. C. Fields has nothing on me.) When Crombie can spare the time for the actual crime story, the plotting is intriguing, tight and twisty. But for me, the price to be paid for the mystery plot is now way too high. I'm sure there are readers who want to be a fly on the wall observing the details of the couple's domestic life, but I'm not one of them.

Mary Russell. Back when I read Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice, the first book in her series featuring bluestocking Mary Russell, I was charmed. The 15-year-old orphan Russell is impatiently waiting out her minority in the care of a disagreeable aunt when she meets Sherlock Holmes, who is engaged in beekeeping while in semi-retirement in Sussex. I loved the relationship struck up between the two, as he trains her in the art of detection. Naturally, I went on to read succeeding books in the series, which are exciting adventures in locations as far-flung as Dartmoor, Palestine and San Francisco. But one constant was always the erudite and entertaining banter between Holmes and Russell, and their close sleuthing partnership.

A few books ago, King began sending Holmes and Russell off in different directions in their investigations. They would still usually have some correspondence and would eventually meet up and work together, but the characters on their own missed the spark they had when together. In the latest book in the series, Pirate King, Holmes is out of the picture almost entirely, until more than three-quarters of the way through the book. The story is told mostly through a first-person narrative by Russell, who comes across as a self-satisfied, humorless prig. I'm thinking this book is meant to set the stage for the series to become entirely Russell-focused. If so, I'm out.

Maisie Dobbs. This is another series that I liked at the outset, but whose protagonist I have come to view as tiresome. She started out being spunky; a largely self-educated working-class girl who, after serving as a nurse in the Great War, sets up her own detective agency. The ninth book in the series is just about to be published, but I gave up with number seven, The Mapping of Love and Death. Life is too short to read books––even well-written books––about a character as mopey as Maisie Dobbs. She is never-endingly sobersided, has virtually no real personal life and I just couldn't take her glumness anymore. In the same vein is Charles Todd's Bess Crawford. I read the first book in that series and that was more than enough. If either one of these women cracked a smile, their faces might break.

So where are the good female protagonists these days?

Back in the 1990s, I used to enjoy Lauren Henderson's Sam Jones series. Sam was a London sculptor with an extremely lively personal life who was always stumbling into bizarre and threatening situations. Sam could never resist poking her nose in, no matter the risk. Book titles like Black Rubber Dress, Freeze My Margarita and Strawberry Tattoo convey the cheeky style of this series. Lauren Henderson also collaborated with Stella Duffy to produce an anthology of bad-girl crime fiction called Tart Noir. (Great title!) Alas, the last Sam Jones mystery was published in 2001 and I have given up hope for more.

Liza Cody was also a favorite in my (relative) youth. She wrote two gritty series, one featuring Anna Lee, a London PI, and another with Eva Wylie, a wrestler and security guard. Cody seems to be done with these series, though she is still writing. Maybe I should check out her latest nonseries book, Ballad of a Dead Nobody, about the mystery of the death of a female founder of a rock-and-roll band.

And I can't forget another old favorite, Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski. Over the years, though, I've gone off her. Or maybe not so much her as the books, which came to feel dominated by social issues. What do you say, should I go back and try again?

I've also enjoyed Sujata Massey's Rei Shimura and Cara Black's Aimée Leduc. Both of these are still good, but it appears that the Rei Shimura series is most likely over, and the Aimée Leduc series has become to seem somewhat formulaic. Kerry Greenwood's 1920s Melbourne, Australia, flapper/sleuth, Phryne Fisher, is a hoot, but the books are just bits of fluff.

I used to like Margaret Maron's Sigrid Harald series, but I could never get into her Deborah Knott books. Her new book, Three-Day Town, puts the two characters together for the first time, but to the detriment of both. The book can only be described as a disappointment to fans of both protagonists.

It's a sad state of affairs when one of the feistiest and most interesting female protagonists is an 11-year-old girl––by whom I mean, of course, Alan Bradley's Flavia de Luce. But as lively and amusing as Flavia is, I want to read about a grownup woman who is vibrant, intelligent (like Harriet Vane), has a sense of humor, doesn't moon around about men and children (I'm looking at you, Rebecca Cantrell's Hannah Vogel), and who doesn't make a habit of endangering herself with too-stupid-to-live decisions (that bad trait applies to all-too-many female protagonists).

But it is possible to go too far in the strong female protagonist vein. In Sophie Littlefield's A Bad Day for Sorry, Sara Hardesty is a survivor of domestic abuse who runs a sewing shop in Missouri and, as a sideline, acts as amateur sleuth and a vigilante against abusive men. This book was nominated for several awards, but I was not charmed by a character whose investigative methods consist of beating up and intimidating people. Another strong character––one whose methods don't constitute felonies––is Helene Tursten's Detective Inspector Irene Huss, who is a 40-something police detective in Göteborg, Sweden. Huss is smart and likable, as she navigates through the hazards of a sexist work environment and a sometimes challenging family life. Unfortunately, the novels featuring Huss are of the grimly nordic variety, with too big a helping of disturbingly graphic violence for my taste.

There are several female secondary characters I admire and would like to see more of, like Diane Fry of Stephen Booth's series featuring Ben Cooper, Ellen Destry of Garry Disher's series featuring Hal Challis, and Annie Cabbot of Peter Robinson's Alan Banks series. I'm not a fan of Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers of Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley series. Havers is her own worst enemy and it irritates me to see her shoot herself in the foot repeatedly.

So, here we are. I've trashed a bunch of female protagonists––I hope not too many readers' favorites––and bemoaned the disappearance or too-little-appearance of women characters I like. But it can't be hopeless. I'm convinced there must be some female protagonists going strong out there. Two possibilities, and I'd welcome comments on them, are Dana Stabenow's Kate Shugak and Julia Spenser-Fleming's Claire Ferguson.

I hope to find somebody who can restore my faith in the female sleuth. Ruth Rendell, once asked about her choice to have a male protagonist in her Inspector Wexford series, quoted Simone de Beauvoir: "Like most women I am still very caught up in a web that one writes about men because men are the people and we are the others." Reminded of that statement in 2009, Rendell said that times had changed, replying: "I don't think that our sex is the people or the others, we're all the people. Perhaps because women are taken more seriously now, not just by men but by each other." I agree that times have changed and it's high time we had a female protagonist as compelling as some of my male favorites, like Inspector Wexford, Commissaire Adamsberg, Armand Gamache, or even Andy Dalziel. (The last of whom, given the recent sad death of Reginald Hill, is now the late lamented Andy Dalziel, I suppose.)

Note: I received free review copies of Deborah Crombie's No Mark Upon Her and Laurie R. King's Pirate King.

Have Ambulance, Will Travel

I am amazed to think that we are coming up to the 100th anniversary of the War To End All Wars. I've been intrigued by the WWI era and I frequently read mysteries that use the days after the war and into the 1920s as a backdrop for unusual themes and interesting characters who inhabit the shadowy world of crime fiction.

One of the sub-genres of mystery fiction is that involving the plucky young woman who has the foresight to cast off the shackles that were keeping women at home, barefoot, pregnant and yada yada. Class barriers at this time were dissolving for many reasons, only one of which was the fact that an entire generation of Britain's young men had been wiped out and women were stepping in to fill the breaches. There were a few of these young ladies who cast off their pasts and leapt to the defense of the good guys, managing to get themselves close to the front lines of the war in France, either as ambulance drivers or nurses.

Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher was one of the early protagonists who fit this mold. I first encountered Phryne Fisher when she took her first case that started with an ocean voyage to Australia in Cocaine Blues. This mystery introduced Phryne as a wealthy young woman with some relation to the British nobility. It was the decade of the 1920s and the Honourable Phryne was at loose ends in London.

Phryne had not always been rich; she was actually born in Australia in circumstances of poverty, but her father came into an inheritance and the Fishers left their privation behind them. Phryne was named after a courtesan of extraordinary beauty who lived in Ancient Greece in the 4th century BC. This lovely was purported to be the model for some famous statues of Venus.

Hispano-Suiza

After finishing school, Phryne went to France and joined a French women's ambulance unit during WWI and was duly decorated for bravery. Phryne being quite beautiful, she also worked for awhile as an artist's model. After the success of solving her first murder case, she settles down in Melbourne, Australia, in a house with the number 221B and has no problems finding clients. She has a certain code of conduct, but she does enjoy the company of lovers. She also drives a Hispano-Suiza, one of the few in her part of the country. Greenwood has drawn a vivid portrait of a very intriguing sleuth with an excellent sense of place and time and I have enjoyed almost all of the 18 books in this series. I have kept two for a rainy day because I don't tire of Phryne.

Another intrepid young lady of fiction who has fled home and hearth is the American, Jade del Cameron, whose character has hints of Beryl Markham and Isak Dinesen. This series of six books so far is written by Suzanne Arruda. Jade was raised on a ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico. But we are introduced to her in Mark of the Lion when she is attached to the French Army as an ambulance driver. Her mantra when the shells are pelting down is "I only occupy one tiny space, the shells have all the rest of France to hit."

After surviving an air raid by the skin of her teeth Jade takes on the dying wish of a mortally wounded pilot who asks her to find his brother and thus begins her career as a detective. Her investigation leads her to Nairobi, Africa. Later she comes back to Africa as a photographer, but mysteries and occasional murders require her sleuthing skills. She is an intrepid soul and counts marksmanship, knowledge of motor mechanics learned in the ambulance corps and piloting an airplane among her abilities.

The backdrop of Africa enlivens this series. Del Cameron is frequently either going into the wilds on safari or on photographic jobs in the interior, while at the same time clashing with the staid British ideas of how a woman should behave. She is gutsy enough to try everything and has no fear when she has to pilot an airplane. Jade is very different from Phryne Fisher and both series have a lot to recommend them.

Perhaps the best known of our mold-shattering young women is Jacqueline Winspear's amazing Maisie Dobbs. There are eight books chronicling her adventures. She is introduced in Maisie Dobbs, which was the Agatha Award winner for Best First Novel in 2003. Maisie was the daughter of a costermonger (someone who sells fruit and vegetables from a wheel barrow) and she went into service at the age of 13 as a maid for an aristocratic family in London. She was very bright and, with the help of her employers, she left their service, went to school and later trained in the nursing profession.

MG

While a battlefield nurse during the war, part of a Voluntary Aid Detachment, Maisie was injured both in body and spirit. She returned to London after the war to work with her mentor, a well-known detective, Dr. Maurice Blanche, at Discrete Investigations. When Blanche retires, Maisie opens her own detective agency. She is cautious, concerned about the state England is in but she does need to get around and so has an MG as a pair of wheels.

In her first case, she is asked to look into why several severely scarred veterans are dying unexpectedly at a therapy retreat on a farm. Maisie sees that perhaps the murderer may be as much a victim of the war as the vets. This story makes us very aware that wars don't stop on the date the history books give us; in fact, they never end. The repercussions are like the splash of a pebble in a brook, ever widening. Winspear does the history of the social changes that came about after the Great War beautifully without sermonizing.

I won't make a prediction about which of these heroines you would like best. Perhaps it is important to know that there were real women who could have been the models for characters such as these. One of them is Hélène Dutrieu (10 July 1877 – 26 June 1961), known as the Belgian Hawk, who was a cycling world champion and stunt person, pioneer aviator, wartime ambulance driver and a director of a military hospital. After the war she was a journalist.